Posted on 07/05/2016 10:16:32 PM PDT by LibWhacker
This image, captured with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, is the largest and sharpest image ever taken of the Andromeda galaxy -- otherwise known as M31.
This is a cropped version of the full image and has 1.5 billion pixels. You would need more than 600 HD television screens to display the whole image.
It is the biggest Hubble image ever released and shows over 100 million stars and thousands of star clusters embedded in a section of the galaxy's pancake-shaped disc stretching across over 40 000 light-years.
This image is too large to be easily displayed at full resolution and is best appreciated using the zoom tool.
I don't think I've ever seen a picture of Andromeda where more than a handful of stars in the galaxy were resolved. It's so far away, it's hard to get individual stars to show up. But here, you can see 100 million individual stars, or so they claim. Wowza! Thank you, Hubble.
Did they see the Enterprise?
Cool! I’d love to have a whole wall with image like that so full of detail and depth
Why would the aircraft carrier be way out there in another univeres?
Hubble has taken some simply amazing pictures, I’ve been checking out the site since I stumbled on it around 15 years ago.
It was originally easier to navigate, I liked the old version better. In the Deep Space section they have pictures of galaxies and pictures taken through gravitational lenses that are incredible. 13 billion light years away are these red dots that are still more galaxies...just mind bending...
Check out this picture, one of my favorites.
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2003/01/image/a/
Beautiful image, thanks for posting!
Very nice, thx! It always amazes me that they can make any sense out of all those arcs and what they are showing.
Ping-Pong
If the Hubble were turned to look at Earth could it focus on us?
That is absolutely the Enterprise with its warp engine photon drive set to “infra” mode, which lowers the pulse resonance and smoothens the ride. Good for relatively low speed cruising and easier on the superstructure. The telltale reddish glow is either a bug or a feature depending on who you talk to.
or worm hole
I sincerely appreciate your faith in my assumed encyclopaedic mastery of trivia, but I must confess I have no idea.
But if you want me to guess.....
I suppose that it would be like using long range binoculars to look at something visible to the naked eye lying at your feet. In other words the optics would be ill suited to the task.
But in as much as I’m a Liberal Arts Snowflake with a degree in GPLS I could be completely wrong. But instinct tells me that something designed for the widest, deepest field of vision possible would be ill suited for locating gnats living on a local rock.
A few questions - since when did the Hubble, which as far as I know was an all-American achievement from design to build to orbiting it and repairing it in orbit become the “NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope” ? I have no problems with the ESA using our hardware and crediting them with the image if it was their doing but it sounds like they own part of it.
A few minutes have passed and I've just answered my own question, according to Wikipedia the ESA did indeed help out with funding since the build phase. Strange that I've never heard about it before.
Two observations - the image we are seeing is static. I wonder how many years, decades, centuries it will take to get enough motion data to be able to map the individual stars we see in this image as a particle cloud and use the observed data to create a motion simulation that stretches over millions of years.
I've also wondered for several years now about the fact that, although we are only seeing a 2-D slice of a 3-D volumetric space there seem to be very well defined areas where stars form chains, arcs and even circles as well as areas where the space is completely empty. While some of the effect is probably illusionary from looking at things in 2-d is it possible that the myriad of stars are acting as markers to show us “something” (not sure what) in much the same way as iron particles line up to show magnetic lines of force. Finally, how much time will we need to get enough parallax from the Earth's motion relative to Andromeda's to generate a 3-d view, although I don't know if this possible given the fact that we are moving toward Andromeda, not parallel to it.
I wonder if the resolution is good enough to see the Kelvan mothership.........
Impossible to comprehend the magnitude of the number of stars in that tiny slice of the universe.
A few minutes have passed and I’ve just answered my own question, according to Wikipedia the ESA did indeed help out with funding since the build phase. Strange that I’ve never heard about it before.
...
I bet we the taxpayer paid a much larger share than the ESA. Also, all images since 2004, because of the ESA involvement, are not public domain.
Bookmark for later.
It’s actually a Galaxy Express Manga Space Train!
Given the billions and billions (as the late Dr. Carl Sagan would say) of stars and planets out there, how could there not be life throughout the universe?
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