Posted on 11/13/2023 1:33:25 PM PST by MtnClimber
Explanation: Have you ever seen the Andromeda galaxy? Although M31 appears as a faint and fuzzy blob to the unaided eye, the light you see will be over two million years old, making it likely the oldest light you ever will see directly. The featured image captured Andromeda just before it set behind the Swiss Alps early last year. As cool as it may be to see this neighboring galaxy to our Milky Way with your own eyes, long duration camera exposures can pick up many faint and breathtaking details. The image is composite of foreground and background images taken consecutively with the same camera and from the same location. Recent data indicate that our Milky Way Galaxy will collide and coalesce with Andromeda galaxy in a few billion years.
For more detail go to the link and click on the image for a high definition image. You can then move the magnifying glass cursor then click to zoom in and click again to zoom out. When zoomed in you can scan by moving the side bars on the bottom and right side of the image.
There’s nothing like the universe to bring you down to earth.
I thought it had to be a combination of two images, perhaps taken with two different lenses, but it seems like the photographer used a zoom lens, for a wide angle shot, then zooming in to M31 for a close-up, and then combining them. Pretty cool.
There’s nothing like the universe to bring you down to earth.
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Ain’t it the truth?
The astronomical image seems way out of scale with the mountaintop.
The scaling does seem distorted, but the Andromeda Galaxy is a large object in the night sky. It’s just diffuse so, at best, the unaided eye only detects the core.
The apparent size is about 3x1 degrees, the moon is about 1/2 degree; so overall about 6 times the size of the moon. It’s coming for us (in a couple billion years).
Absolutely the scale is wrong. The text with the image says the image is a "... composite of foreground and background images". So in other words the image is, fake, fake, fake. I wish APOD would stop using flagrantly unrepresentative images of the sky like this.
Wow.
I wish it was as big and as visible as that picture.
WOW !!
I wish it was as big and as visible as that picture.
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Yeah, I know! If the Andromeda galaxy was really that big we would have no trouble seeing it naked eye! It wouldn’t look like that, but it certainly be visible.
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