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New 10 Terapixel Image of the Night Sky Contains 1B Galaxies
- lb1lf 6y agoWhenever life gets you down, Mrs.Brown And things seem hard or tough And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft And you feel that you've had quite enough Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned A sun that is the source of all our power The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see Are moving at a million miles a day In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour Of the galaxy we call the 'milky way' Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars It's a hundred thousand light years side to side It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point We go 'round every two hundred million years And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions In this amazing and expanding universe The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding In all of the directions it can whizz As fast as it can go, the speed of light, you know Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure How amazingly unlikely is your birth And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space 'Cause it's bugger all down here on Earth -Eric Idle
- efynn 6y agoHad to sing it along :-D
- aduitsis 6y agoThe vastness of the cosmos we are living in, is simply unfathomable. I'm not even sure we have the ability to really appreciate the scale here. After a certain point it becomes just numbers.
- unavoidable 6y agoI agree, unfathomable. But one interesting thought that I usually entertain is that based on our best estimates there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on Earth. Now imagine every time you step foot on a beach and think - there is potentially a star system for every grain! https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/are-there-more-grains-of-sand-or-stars-in-the-earth.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/are-there-more-grains-of...
- prawn 6y agoAlso a bit incredible is that it's believed that in the last 60 years, we've manufactured more transistors than there are grains of sand. Sand grain estimate is 7.5x10^18. Transistor estimate between 1960 and 2018 was 1.3x10^22.
- abiogenesis 6y agoIt is ironic that transistors are (kind of) made of sand too.
- Maursault 6y ago> > Sand grain estimate is 7.5x10^18. Transistor estimate between 1960 and 2018 was 1.3x10^22. > It is ironic that transistors are (kind of) made of sand too. Shouldn't we have run out of sand years ago?
- Dylan16807 6y agoEvery square millimeter on a silicon wafer has fit tens of millions of transistors for a while. Since the wafer is a under a millimeter thick that's about one grain of sand. So we wouldn't have run out even with those numbers. Also it doesn't have to be sand, exactly, and more than half the earth's crust is silica. But more importantly, that number is very wrong. https://web.archive.org/web/20150310025854/http://www.hawaii.edu/suremath/jsand.html https://web.archive.org/web/20150310025854/http://www.hawaii... Leaving aside the issue of whether 1mm cubed is a good estimate for an 'average' grain, this is only an estimate of beach sand. Also it seems to be underestimating shore length by a lot, 200 million meters when other sources say 1.2 or 1.6 billion meters. His estimate for beach surface area is 6000 square kilometers. The sahara alone is 9 million square kilometers, with sand much deeper too. The first estimate I see, just for that one desert, is 1.5e24 grains of sand. Another way to look at it is that we apparently use 50 billion tons of sand per year. That's less than a thousand square kilometers worth of sahara. And making 10^22 transistors with 2012 tech would take only 750 thousand tons of sand.
- jonnypotty 6y agoOur perception gives up way before this scale
- postingawayonhn 6y agoThe passage of time is probably even more unfathomable. On a long enough timescale our species is completely irrelevant.
- dmje 6y agoThis. Just mindblowing. It either means we're 1) completely insignificant or 2) incredibly significant. Or, I suppose 3) a sort of mediocre level of significance. Damn. "Mostly Harmless".
- ac42 6y ago"Tragula was horrified to learn he had destroyed her mind, even as he proved his point that if life was going to live in such a vast Universe, one thing it could not afford to have was a sense of perspective."
- macu 6y agoI wonder how the ASKAP dataset will compare when it's rendered as an image
- protoman3000 6y agoCompared to winning the jackpot in a standard state's lottery, how unlikely is it that Earth is the only planet containing life?
- steve_adams_86 6y agoHonest question: Is it possible to answer this without knowing how life occurs?
- jandrese 6y agoIMHO anybody who says we are alone hasn't comprehended the scale of the universe. It's unthinkable that there isn't life elsewhere on the almost uncountable other star systems. Unfortunately I think we may have also proven that interstellar travel is effectively impossible thanks to the Fermi paradox.
- captainclam 6y agoOr the great filter. :/
- indrax 6y agoIf the info we have is proof that no species in history could do any of the things that would let us notice them, then it can't also be strong evidence that they must exist.
- aardvark179 6y agoThat’s a hard question to answer. The Drake equation breaks the problem down by expressing it as the product of other probabilities that might be easier to quantify, but even pinning down some of those is still really hard.
- lwansbrough 6y agoNot sure it's possible to answer this question accurately with a sample size of 1. :)
- Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
- wmwmwm 6y agoI could look at this in full-res if only I had a multi monitor setup with a million 4k screens!
- lionkor 6y ago... and enough DP cables to cause a massive fire hazard, I'd assume.
- tosser0001 6y agoThis is just a wrapper around: https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/a-billion-galaxies-lurk-in-a-10-trillion-pixel-map-of-the-sky https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/a-billion-galaxies-lurk-in-a-1... Probably should change the link to that
- stevenhuang 6y agoThis is another good link https://djschlegel.wordpress.com/faq-legacy-survey-sky-image/ https://djschlegel.wordpress.com/faq-legacy-survey-sky-image... , from the webview itself.
- dang 6y agoThanks to you both! I've changed the URL above to the image viewer and added https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26071672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26071672 with those extra links.
- mmazing 6y agoNah. It's stunning to be thrown directly into that map. Having to parse a bunch of text to find a tiny link at the bottom of that page kinda takes something away.
- cma 6y agoHas anyone taken stuff like this and applied deep learning to cluster it and look for galaxies/other entities with standout features? Any good papers on stuff like that?
- hypertele-Xii 6y agoGalaxy Zoo [1] applies distributed humans to classify galaxies. [1] https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zookeeper/galaxy-zoo/ https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zookeeper/galaxy-zoo/
- cma 6y agoSeems they may be experimenting with training models too: https://blog.galaxyzoo.org/2019/05/21/machine-learning-messaging-experiment/ https://blog.galaxyzoo.org/2019/05/21/machine-learning-messa...
- dazhbog 6y agoI tried to zoom in, and it only went a few clicks.. I was like cool. Then I started zooming out and out and out. The scale is just insane.. Im sure if we had a better camera and a medium to store the pixels, it would be like a Mandelbrot basically.
- mattkevan 6y agoPerhaps it should have a tiny tiny marker with the legend, ‘You are here’.
- sixstringtheory 6y agoAgreed, I was a bit confused at first! Also, I found it helpful to turn on constellation overlays to get a sense for how much of the night sky is covered.
- DiogenesKynikos 6y agoThe max zoom of the website is pretty much the maximum resolution seen by the telescope. You can tell because you can see the point-spread functions of the stars (i.e., they look like blobs) at the maximum zoom. In order to get better resolution, you need to put your telescope at a better site (on a higher, drier mountain with a more laminar airflow; or in space), or you need adaptive optics (which limits your field of view, making it unsuited to large surveys of the sky like this).
- elil17 6y agoThe viewer is served using a REST protocol and Javascript library used to display maps. Just thought that was cool!
- Jakobeha 6y agoThe size of this image is comparable to Google Maps. Go to Google maps and zoom out as much as possible. The bottom right hand corner should display a line measuring 1000 miles. Then zoom in so that the line measures 1 mile. This is the same as zooming out on this map so to 30 degrees, then zooming in to 100 arcsec. Google maps can zoom in a bit more to 20ft, but it's still impressive.
- floxy 6y agoHere's an unrelated question. Do we think essentially all stars are contained within galaxies? Or could there be there free-floating stars in the universe that aren't confined to galaxies?
- sanity31415 6y agoGalaxies aren't always cohesive, they can collide, split apart, etc - so the answer is "no".
- renke1 6y agoSee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_star Also interesting: "The hypothesis that stars exist only in galaxies was disproven in 1997 with the discovery of intergalactic stars."
- gizmo686 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergalactic_star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergalactic_star Such stars have been observed to exist. The common thought is that they formed within galaxies but ejected from them through gravitational forces.
- floxy 6y agoAwesome. That's a great article: "...several other anisotropies at other wavelengths – including blue and x-ray – have been detected with other space telescopes and they are now collectively described as the diffuse extragalactic background radiation. Several explanations have been discussed by scientists, but in 2012, it was suggested and shown how for the first time this diffuse radiation might originate from intergalactic stars. If that is the case, they might collectively comprise as much mass as that found in the galaxies. A population of such magnitude was at one point thought to explain the photon underproduction crisis, and may explain a significant part of the dark matter problem."
- jacquesm 6y agoSolar system sized intergalactic spacecraft.
- AbraKdabra 6y agoThere is absolutely no possible way we are alone in the universe.
- Razengan 6y agoSorry, our science dictates that we are.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y agoYou're allowing a lack of evidence to be evidence of the negative. The incredible vastness of the universe means it's incredibly unlikely we're the only intelligent civilization in existence. But the incredible size of the universe also means that any radio signals being emitted by said civilizations haven't reached us, and even if they did, they'd be so weak they'd just be background noise. A picture with 1 billion galaxies...each with millions of stars...each potentially with any number of planets...it just seems really unlikely that we're the only ones out there. But even if we somehow proved another civilization exists, outside of the knowledge that we're not alone, it'd be meaningless. They're way too far away to observe, let alone communicate with.
- Koshkin 6y ago> each with millions of stars Almost half a trillion in the case of Milky Way.
- tcldr 6y agoSource?
- NeutronStar 6y agoBased on human science and based on the fact that normal matter only represent 4% of all matter.
- AbraKdabra 6y agoThat's not called science.
- redisman 6y agoVery excited to see what the James Webb telescope will show us if the launch happens this year as planned
- kangnkodos 6y agoThere are two very similar galaxies here. I've heard of a gravity lens making a star look like it's two. Is it possible a gravity lens is making a galaxy look like two? https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=211.0715&dec=81.6327&layer=ls-dr9&zoom=13 https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=211.0715&dec=81.6327&lay...
- kangnkodos 6y agoIf you select Overlays, Bright Objects, Tycho-2 stars, they get labelled as Tycho-2 4564-935-1 and Tycho-2 4564-1031-1. So I guess they are stars?
- sega_sai 6y agoThese are bright stars so they are in Tycho catalogue (which is a catalog of 2.5 million brightest stars)
- SiempreViernes 6y agoThose look like two saturated stars, so not actually galaxies. But in general yes, gravitational lenses can create multiples images of a galaxy, here is an example of four images ( pretty rare, not of galaxies though) https://www.space.com/28744-cosmic-lens-4-supernova-views-photo.html https://www.space.com/28744-cosmic-lens-4-supernova-views-ph...
- sega_sai 6y agoThose are saturated stars. When the stars are too bright the charge tend do spread along the detector producing those lines
- DavidSJ 6y agoWhat are all the horizontal bands?
- dvh 6y agoCCD artefact. In CCD charge from one pixel is carried to the edge of the chip to be read, when the signal is too strong it bleeds into neighboring pixels. This is how CCD works: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/66/CCD_charge_transfer_animation.gif/250px-CCD_charge_transfer_animation.gif https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/66/CC...
- SiempreViernes 6y agoBig diffraction spikes for oversaturated stars.
- SiempreViernes 6y agoHere's an example where you get to see lots of the optics in the telescope along with the sky: https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=165.4455&dec=56.3941&layer=ls-dr9&zoom=11 https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=165.4455&dec=56.3941&lay...
- sega_sai 6y agoDiffraction spikes are different from saturation trails. The saturation goes preferentially along CCD columns/rows, while diffraction spikes are oriented like the support of the secondary mirror.
- gillytech 6y agoThis makes me feel a little better about the whole "heat death" problem.
- notum 6y agoEnjoy it while you can folks, next iteration of this project will only show Starlink serial numbers in great detail.
- jbritton 6y agoAny idea what the colors indicate. There are some patches of mainly blue galaxies on a black background. These stand out as kind of unique. I initially zoomed all the way out, and in the top left is a giant blue and black area that looks like a lamp. I assumed this to be some imaging problem. Upon zooming in though one can see other blue on black areas.
- sega_sai 6y agoThere are some areas where only data in one of the colors is available -- those look either blue/red or green.
- KenoFischer 6y agoCounting the number of galaxies in these image datasets is actually a highly non-trivial, supercomputer-scale problem. I worked on this a few years back! Paper link for those interested: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.10277.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.10277.pdf
- hi41 6y agoCongratulations! Thank you for making the world better with such amazing work!
- oh_sigh 6y agoWhy supercomputer? Isn't this kind of classification task embarrassingly parallelizable?
- holycrapwhodat 6y agoModern supercomputers are obscenely parallel machines built to chew through embarrassingly parallelizable tasks.
- GreenHeuristics 6y agoSo is a GPU
- nevi-me 6y ago
- 0000011111 6y agoIn November 2013, astronomers reported, based on Kepler space mission data, that there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of sun-like stars and red dwarf stars within the Milky Way Galaxy.[2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#Current_estimates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#Current_estimat... So at a rate of 40 billion earth like planets in each galaxy. Deep field from Hubble turned up 125 billion galaxies. 125 billion * 40 billion = 5e+21 That means that over billions of years there is allot of time for life creation and death within the universe.
- Koshkin 6y agoThat would be on average 1 out of every 10 stars - hard to believe.
- ksherlock 6y agoOur solar system has Earth and Mars. Venus is on the edge of the habitable zone. Had the asteroid belt formed a planet, it would be on the edge as well.
- floxy 6y agoTwo trillion galaxies (2e12) according to: https://phys.org/news/2017-01-universe-trillion-galaxies.html https://phys.org/news/2017-01-universe-trillion-galaxies.htm...
- flippyhead 6y agoRight, but, what does it all mean?
- lurquer 6y agoWould it be possible to create a bitmap of the night sky such that the data — as stored on the storage medium — corresponded to the stars’ relative locations? Like a DVD or CD... Anyway, I think if we created such an image and left the burned DVDs here and there, we could seriously confuse the shit out of some future archeologist.
- limeblack 6y agoDVD life span is 30 to 100 years[1] so I would try something else. [1] https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/articles/00009195#:~:text=A%20typical%20DVD%20disc%20has,the%20longevity%20of%20the%20media https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/articles/00009195#:....
- lurquer 6y agoSheesh. You have to ruin everything... Ok... How about this... Let’s do it backwards: arrange the data on a DVD so that the one’s correspond to the stars in their relative position. Then, see what the resulting image looks like. Or, better yet, read it as an MPEG; imagine the horror if it outputted as a rickroll.
- 0134340 6y agoThat was done like 40 years ago: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-is-on-voyagers-golden-record-73063839/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-is-on-voy...
- soheil 6y agoAre there any projects to determine if there are any patterns and if the galaxies and stars are perfectly randomly distributed or not [1]? For example could there be rules like there is always an odd number of galaxies within a specific radius of a red giant star. Or could there be a prime number of galaxies in every certain measurement of a patch of the image. [1] not including the microwave background radiation
- 01acheru 6y agoI don't know if I understand what you're asking... what meaning would there be in measuring "an odd number of galaxies within a specific radius of a red giant star"? It would be purely from our point of view, those galaxies might look like in a radius in a flat representation but they are incredibly far away from each other and the red giant star it's waaay closer to us than those galaxies. Same kind of reasoning applies to the other examples... could you elaborate a bit? Not to say you're wrong about anything, I simply didn't get it edit: grammar
- soheil 6y agoFor example we see gravitation lensing effect even though the galaxy that is causing it is in front of what is being lensed from our perspective. So there may still be reasons to see if there are any patterns even if it's just from our perspective and also because it's the only one we have access to.
- sega_sai 6y agoThe galaxies are not randomly distributed. In fact there are correlations between galaxy distributions at various scales that essentialy can be traced to initial perturbations that arose after the big bang. Multiple projects are now working on exactly figuring out those correlations as a function of scale.
- soheil 6y agoI understand the galaxies can be traced back to those initial perturbations, but regardless of that, it'd be interesting to see if there are any patterns that can be identified at a large scale and based on similar sky survey images posted here. Are there any projects working on identifying such patterns?
- 01acheru 6y agoI know that what I'm about to say isn't constructive in any way but after looking at the image and scrolling around a bit I have this echo in my head: that's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. I actually don't have words to describe this feeling, not in any language I know. It's simply incredible!
- Lambdanaut 6y agoIt's akin to the feeling I've gotten from unsettling realizations during psychedelic trips. Beautiful and humbling.
- 01acheru 6y agoTrue, I still remember that one night: "Time does not exist". I literally felt it, lived it, it still bugs me after many years.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoYou might enjoy reading about Entropy and its connection to time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(arrow_of_time) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(arrow_of_time)
- cafebabbe 6y agoIt's basically an IRL version of the Total Perspective Vortex.
- dang 6y agoWe changed the URL from https://kottke.org/21/02/10-terapixel-image-of-the-night-sky https://kottke.org/21/02/10-terapixel-image-of-the-night-sky to the viewer. Another article is https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/a-billion-galaxies-lurk-in-a-10-trillion-pixel-map-of-the-sky https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/a-billion-galaxies-lurk-in-a-1... The FAQ is here: https://djschlegel.wordpress.com/faq-legacy-survey-sky-image/ https://djschlegel.wordpress.com/faq-legacy-survey-sky-image...
- qwertox 6y agoThis is incredible. But what is even more amazing, is that if you register and then add the overlays, you'll notice that almost any interesting object is already labeled and categorized, leading to photos of that object in even better resolution. And I'm speaking about objects which are found while using the biggest zoom level already. Those links to further information contain so much additional data, that it left me really surprised how deeply surveyed the sky is, how much work has been put into mapping and categorizing the sky. I'm baffled.
- vardhanw 6y agoGoes to show how a relatively small set of scientists with perhaps some crowd sourcing can achieve. We have the capability of going much further if all humanity works together on understanding our place in the universe - imagine a million people working on this (annotation, survey, search) to build a catalog even more detailed. Makes one wonder if there will ever be a shared human vision - can capitalism deliver it to us or some other political ideology like socialism has it in itself to best tackle humanities problems and explore opportunities. Will we ever reach that point where the futileness of our daily existence is overridden by greater concerns. How do we ever reach such an "ideal" ideology? Is it only through the painful process of blind discovery? Has enough been done to atleast theorize on the best option? Or will it never be possible to even theorize and come up with a solution, forget about implementation. Space provides direct evidence of the wonders of our universe, while human existence provides one about a host of lost opportunities. Perhaps we must just wait for an advanced benign alien existence to rescue us and preserve our own unique wonder of existence. Perhaps enough of us realize this fast enough not to destroy ourselves before we do that. Sorry for the rant.
- leemailll 6y agoAstronomical survey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_survey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_survey) really is an ongoing thing from the beginning of Astronomy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_astronomical_maps,_catalogs,_and_surveys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_astronomical_maps,...). It is also the major project for Hubble telescope
- o_____________o 6y ago
- soheil 6y agoIs there a direct link to the entire image?
- kstrauser 6y agoI mentioned this elsewhere, but... Pick a region at random. Zoom in, scroll a little, zoom in, scroll a little, repeat until you find a galaxy. There. You're likely the only human who has ever seen it and all the wonders it may contain. It's yours to hold. That's your little galaxy.
- Medox 6y agoMandatory watch: Gigapixels of Andromeda https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udAL48P5NJU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udAL48P5NJU With sound.
- Ninjinka 6y agoThis one's mine, back off: https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=235.8839&dec=50.4910&layer=ls-dr9&zoom=16 https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=235.8839&dec=50.4910&lay...
- soheil 6y agoI pick the Milky Way since it's likely no human has ever seen it.
- perl4ever 6y agoSomething that's been on my mind forever is, given the amount of photos and other data that's been gathered, if we put it all together with a really powerful computer/algorithm, could we generate a simulated picture of the Milky Way as if seen face on, at a few million light years above? Without it just being a generic galaxy. I think I remember reading about the latest and greatest direct measurement of stellar distances, and how it's a huge number of stars but a very small radius relative to our whole galaxy. And of course there's all the dust and stuff in the way of viewing. So my belief is that what I want is impossible, but I think I have heard that we're fairly certain our galaxy is a barred spiral?
- soheil 6y agoIs this red line just noise or perhaps a comet or reflection from a satellite? https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=287.1524&dec=51.4408&layer=ls-dr9&zoom=15 https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=287.1524&dec=51.4408&lay...
- sega_sai 6y agoLooks like a cosmic ray on red exposure.
- ipsum2 6y agohttps://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=10.8011&dec=-17.9594&layer=ls-dr9&zoom=12 https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=10.8011&dec=-17.9594&lay... trippy imaging artifacts, looks like abstract art.
- intrasight 6y agoWhen my daughter was in middle school, she participated in the crowd sourced categorization of these galaxies. It's probably a thing. And if you have kids in that age range, they'd probably glom on.
- toufka 6y agohttp://zoo1.galaxyzoo.org/ http://zoo1.galaxyzoo.org/ - looks like it's now been archived. The newer version is here: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zookeeper/galaxy-zoo/ https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zookeeper/galaxy-zoo/
- intrasight 6y agoExcellent!
- kraig911 6y agoIs it just my mind but there are definitely parts that I feel do not look randomly distributed.
- 01acheru 6y agoHow can you perceive not-randomness on such a massive scale? I totally get that some parts might not look evenly distributed, but randomly... it's just too vast :)
- yumraj 6y agoI find it interesting that while this image in itself is flat, every dot that is there represents light from a different time. Some millions of years old to some probably billions of years old.
- Taniwha 6y agoOMG it's full of stars
- snomad 6y agoOff topic, but only 2 weeks until perseverance reaches mars https://www.nasa.gov/perseverance https://www.nasa.gov/perseverance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tITni_HY1Bk&list=PLTiv_XWHnOZqCrMU2ppcLjRn1zlDkNx3q&index=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tITni_HY1Bk&list=PLTiv_XWHnO...
- m463 6y agoI remember being young and wondering why the sky was black instead of white. Maybe the answer is that it is.
- kgin 6y agoMaybe it will be as soon as all the light gets here
- m463 6y agomy exposure time is too short.
- 0134340 6y agoOlber's Paradox. You're not the only one.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoBecause things are moving away from everything else, the visible light they may (are they gone in our time cone?) be emitting is ‘red shifting’ into longer wavelengths that our vision system can not see. If your eyes were capable of visualizing 0-1000 THz, it would see a blinding white noise of creation.
- sparky_ 6y agoDoes anyone know what causes the "scanlines" we see throughout the image, e.g. https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=134.9718&dec=32.3736&layer=ls-dr9&zoom=12 https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=134.9718&dec=32.3736&lay... ?
- nealabq 6y agoIn the "Jump to object" box on the bottom-right you can type m13 to find, for example, Messier object 13. Set the zoom-level to about 12 first. m51 is worth a visit. Messier objects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_object#/media/File:All_messier_objects_(numbered).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_object#/media/File:All...
- warent 6y agoHere's a fun little "cluster" I just found: https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=330.8784&dec=12.6412&layer=ls-dr9&zoom=14 https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=330.8784&dec=12.6412&lay... I'm not 100% certain but it seems like this may be an example of severe gravitational lensing, causing the same galaxy to appear as multiple images in different periods of time EDIT: Update link
- astro123 6y agoThere's no strong lensing there. If the background galaxies were lensed enough to have multiple images they would also be incredibly distorted. But that does look like a small group/cluster. Edit: Here is an example of strong lensing - see the very curved object just below the bottom bright galaxy https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=39.9717&dec=-1.5822&layer=ls-dr9&zoom=15 https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=39.9717&dec=-1.5822&laye... This is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abell_370 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abell_370
- vorticalbox 6y agoI fine it super interesting that when you zoom out it appears a lot of the galleries are all horizontal across the image.
- jacquesm 6y agoJust as impressive as zooming in is zooming out. Try it!
- yread 6y agoI wonder why did they choose for Leaflet.js instead of OpenSeadragon.js. Now they have these ugly black squares when loading tiles
- W0lf 6y agoRelated question: Does anybody know if this sort of zooming behaviour (mapping images onto a grid and dynamically load smaller tiles with higher solutions based on current offset) has a concrete, nameable algorithm behind it? Any link to an Open Source implementation would also be interesting.
- Smith42 6y agoYou can also generate similar scale astronomical images with GANs! I worked on a model that could do this last year: Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.10286 https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.10286 7.6 gigapixel image: https://star.herts.ac.uk/~jgeach/gdf https://star.herts.ac.uk/~jgeach/gdf
- mncharity 6y ago> RGB channels corresponding to the F814W, F775W and F606W bands. [from paper] IR, red, and orange. In case anyone else zoomed in, saw odd colors, and wondered. Anyone have suggestions for an HDR or zoomable synthetic field that's visually realistic? Last week I was exploring a try-to-stay-motivated covid project of an "if they're lots of stars, why can't I see them?" educational web app. Basically a horizon+sky slice with sliders for ambient light level (day to night to beyond inner solar system dust scatter) and for exposure (pupil narrow to dilated to dark adapted to hubble at pluto), and presets. Synthetic permits optimizing for pedagogy, and avoids issues around selecting some real region. Might be useful when teaching light pollution. I'd like it for an exploratory atoms-up early-primary learning progression variant emphasizing nuclei, thus nucleosynthesis, and a "I've seen skies of stars in video, but stars are almost absent from my lived experience" challenge. Collaboration welcome. :)
- peter_d_sherman 6y agoLike Google Maps -- but for the heavens! Brilliant!
- TheMagicHorsey 6y agoSuddenly everything I do feels very insignificant. I was up at 4am today to do work because it's the only time I can do work with focus without my kids disturbing me. At 6:20am I took a break and saw this thread in HN. Now I'm having an existential crisis.
- krupan 6y agoHey, you are the universe to those kids that you are sacrificing for by getting up at 4 am. Call a friend or family member if you need. You are not insignificant.
- person_of_color 6y agoHow many of these galaxies have Earth-like planets? It's difficult to escape the conclusion the universe is teeming with life.
- person_of_color 6y agoCould the fact that life is potentially far flung across a vast multitude of galaxies be part of a purposeful design to ensure it doesn't wipe itself out? Biodiversity, but in space-time.
- dalmo3 6y agoIf you want to get rid of the overlay (I wanted a new wallpaper!): body { overflow: hidden; } .leaflet-control-container { display: none; }