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How much of the pictures in the article are processed? What does the unprocessed photo look like?
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There really is a lot of stuff left to see for the first time
"A lot" is the number of fish in a swarm maybe. This is so far away from our concept of counting things that the mind just gives up. There's no comparison, no dumbing down to X amount of football fields, just nothing. I find it depressing, confusing but also inspiring and fascinating at the same time.
In ways the bacteria on the dust are oblivious to the scale and nature of the world around them, we seem similarly lost and hopeless in the pursuit of comprehending the universe. We just weren’t built to grasp this kind of scale. We can enjoy images of the tiniest little slices of it, though. I’m actually very grateful for that. I think it’ll be a source of endless wonder for my entire life.
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I wonder how fast an observer would need to be traveling for it to look like that!
99.x% the speed of light, but the image would be blueshifted and highly distorted.
The amount of faint Galaxies in the final image is absolutely astounding, there's no way we are alone.
Gorgeous and upsetting that I'll never be able to visit it. 13 billion years before me, potentially trillions of years after me. Seems like such a waste of the spark of awareness that I can't take that awareness and experience the galaxy in all its glory.
But you just did. That's what we're doing.
The horse head part that we see is 3x4 LY in size. If you wanted to experience that horse head like you would, say, a mountain -- just a large, field of view dominating visage. You would need to be about 20+ Lightyears away from it.
I don't know how bright the nebula is, but after 20 lightyears, I don't know how much the human eye could perceive it. And, likely, by the time you got close enough to actually see it, it may well just be a hazy cloud with no definition, since you'd be so close.
Things like these may only be able to be experienced by us through artificial means. Through embellishment and enhancement.
You can go and buy a "smart telescope" today that you can push a button, and point it at any of the "local" nebulas or other bright objects in the sky. Yet, if you look through the eyepiece, you won't see much. Even with magnification, it's a gray, fuzzy blob. The smart telescope will automatically capture more light, through longer exposures, and create a composite image with better definition and detail. Even with magnification, we can not experience those objects directly.
Astronomy, for me, is most "personal" with a pair of binoculars, particular a pair of stabilized binoculars. A mundane pair will open up the sky in a breathtaking way. Because it's more "real". It's not a picture on screen, and it wide and sweeping and huge.
But you can't really get those really fun Milky Way photos folks are making, not with binoculars. You CAN see the Milky Way under dark skies, but not like those photo capture them.
So, simply, "you can shut up. Stop typing now. Really", you may well have just experience the nebula as best as it can be done right now. Run that video on a huge TV in a dark room, it will help. Maybe see if any of this stuff is coming to an IMAX theater near you.
The zoom-in video at the end is utterly unbelievable, don't miss it. What an engineering and scientific triumph.
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Of course there are other lifeforms out there, it's statistically implausible for it to be otherwise. What's also implausible is that, given the impossible vastness and hostility of interstellar space, that any will ever manage to contact us, specifically. Fortunately, we've got lots of crazy lifeforms here on Earth to keep us occupied, if we can take a moment to stop extincting them as fast as we possibly can.
First of all: the question needs to be qualified by what we mean by "out there". The galaxy? The observable universe? The entire universe? The universe might be infinite, in which case: yes, there is life out there. We know the probably of life forming on any given planet must be greater than zero, or else we wouldn't be here. From this we can deduce the average volume which contains exactly one planet with life, whi…
That's an incredibly detailed image. Every single time I see one of these amazing space pics, it's hard not to get all philosophical and wonder about the size of space & time on cosmic scale, how small our earth is and how insignificant our regular problems are. I don't care if I don't get to see flying cars or AGI in my lifetime but I will be very disappointed if our knowledge of space remains more or less the same…
Indeed!
Never a bad time to re-watch Cosmos and (in my opinion) the awesome sequel(s) by Neil de Grasse Tyson. Is it weird to admit I even choke up during some of the episodes?
(As an aside, why is it so hard to find the sequels to Cosmos in any streaming service. In my country it's not on Netflix, Disney+, Apple, HBO/Max, Star+, Prime Video. What the hell...? I just want to re-watch the damned thing and I don't own a Blu-ray player. Do I have to pirate the stuff?)