4 ms·

My god, it’s full of stars!

• jcims 4y ago
  Compared to the visible light shot it's easy to see why we're investing in infrared. Looks like an order of magnitude more stars are visible. https://esahubble.org/images/heic1501a/ https://esahubble.org/images/heic1501a/ I just started astrophotography a few months ago and am starting to get a very vague intuition about the imaging pipelines and what things like h-alpha filters can do to amplify certain features. But (possibly because I'll likely never do it) I had no idea how much occlusion is happening in nebulous regions. Galaxies in infrared definitely lose a little something for me. Look at ngc891 in visible light for example: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q490345#/media/File:N891s.jpg https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q490345#/media/File:N891s.jpg Here it is in a bunch of different IR wavelengths: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Images-of-NGC-891-at-various-wavelengths-centred-on-the-galaxys-coordinates-from-NED-a_fig1_260366957 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Images-of-NGC-891-at-var... Quick note: The field of view of the visual spectrum image i linked above is ~4.5 arcminutes, which at the 7000ly distance to the pillars of creation mean the image spans about 9 light years from the left to the right edge. If you download the fullsize jpeg, each pixel represents about 7 billion miles, approximately the diameter of pluto's orbit. On a 96dpi monitor a star the size of our sun would be approximately 1 millionth of an inch.
• SemanticStrengh 4y ago
  Space is indeed very full for a thing synonymous with emptyness.