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
Beautiful image, thanks for posting!
Ping-Pong
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.
Bookmark for later.
bfl
thanks
“The stars, like dust...”
Bfl
I CAN SEE MY HOUSE FROM HERE
Lexa Doig was drop-dead gorgeous as the ship's avatar.
Hummina hummina hummina!