Quote:
Originally Posted by Catfish
Anyway i found this pretty impressive, but the spiral galaxies being photographed by the Hubble telescope are even more unsettling.
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I assume you mean the Hubble Ultimate Deep Field.
Over more than 4 months and more than 400 orbit cycles, Hubble has been focussed and exposed to the same tiny bitpiece of the sky, what they did was exposing the same image more than 800 times for - all exposures added together - more than 1 million seconds (more than eleven days and nights) to the same tiny spot up there, where they assumed to be just black, empty sky.
What that black empty bit of sky was filled with, can be seen here:
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2004/07/image/a/format/zoom/
The viewing angle, the area covered by the image cvompares to 1/50th of the visible moon. The area of all visible sky at all directions would be more than 12 million times as big. Consider the Hubble viewing angle in that image to something like looking through the hull of an ampty pencil.
The original image shows some 10,000 galaxies.
10,000 galaxies in a pencil, so to speak.
Some scientists called this photo the most important picture in all history of mankind.
P.S. If one would do the Deep Field for all other parts of the sky as well, and if one would assume that in statistical mean we would see in every other picture 10,000 galaxies as well, then we would be able to see from earth, by using this technology, 127,000,000,000 galaxies.