January 25, 2015

Andromeda: "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork."

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 available at this link: Sharpest ever view of the Andromeda Galaxy | ESA/Hubble

And then..... on the other end of the scale....

Posted by gerardvanderleun at January 25, 2015 12:23 AM
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"It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood." -- Karl Popper N.B.: Comments are moderated and may not appear immediately. Comments that exceed the obscenity or stupidity limits will be either edited or expunged.

I don't know which is harder to grasp, photographs larger than the earth or trillions of atoms made or rice and sand.
Seems to me that in either case there is a lot of air in between the objects.
If scientists ever figure out how to remove all that air it would make things easier to handle.

Posted by: chasmatic at January 25, 2015 6:11 AM

Air, Chas?

Posted by: Frank P at January 25, 2015 11:31 AM

Frank: first I must offer this disclaimer: One of the few rules I impose on myself is rule 62. Don't ask what the other sixty-one are, I never thought of that.
Also, as this is a written medium I can type easily with my tongue in cheek. If I were speaking to you the result would be rather garbled and keeping a straight face would be difficult. My uncle Letsgo Lozko, who raised bantam chickens, he could keep a straight face better than I.
I graduated high school in 1964 so that would make my diploma the equivalent of a bachelor's degree these days, uh?
Anyway, I called it "air" in both the galactic and the atomic model. Consider a metaphor (even though they are most always insufficient to convey meaning, comparison breaking down at the fifty percent mark) of a pool table with the standard issue of fifteen numbered balls and the cue ball.
With all of them on the table I see what I call air between them. What else would it be called?
Out there in space there is an awful lot of emptiness. Miles and light years between planets just flying around there empty.
I think we have the means to measure the size of an atom of, say, carbon. We also can measure the size of protons, neutrons and electrons, can we not? So take the volume of the atom and subtract the volumes of the sub-atomic particles and we are left with empty space. It seems right to me to call that empty space "air".

Density is the word for how much air is between each atom or in the case of galaxies between all the planets and whatever other objects are flying around up there.
Can you imagine how small the world would be if much of the air was removed from between things?

Posted by: chasmatic at January 25, 2015 12:00 PM

To paraphrase old Lao-tzu, we build the house but we live in the space.

Posted by: Gagdad Bob at January 25, 2015 4:46 PM

Bob: I was told one time "be lucid, but spare me the details". I'm gonna have to work on that. Yep.

Posted by: chasmatic at January 25, 2015 10:43 PM

Today, I went to the beach front with my kids. I found a sea shell and gave
it to my 4 year old daughter and said "You can hear the ocean if you put this to your ear." She placed
the shell to her ear and screamed. There was a hermit crab inside and
it pinched her ear. She never wants to go back! LoL I
know this is entirely off topic but I had to tell someone!

Posted by: Jess at February 2, 2015 5:53 PM