Another Spectacular Hubble Picture

[n2doc]

AUGUST 10, 2010: A long-exposure Hubble Space Telescope image shows a majestic face-on spiral galaxy located deep within the Coma Cluster of galaxies, which lies 320 million light-years away in the northern constellation Coma Berenices. The galaxy, known as NGC 4911, contains rich lanes of dust and gas near its center. These are silhouetted against glowing newborn star clusters and iridescent pink clouds of hydrogen, the existence of which indicates ongoing star formation. Hubble has also captured the outer spiral arms of NGC 4911, along with thousands of other galaxies of varying sizes. The high resolution of Hubble's cameras, paired with considerably long exposures, made it possible to observe these faint details.

This natural-color Hubble image, which combines data obtained in 2006, 2007, and 2009 from the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys, required 28 hours of exposure time.

More versions at link

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2010/24/

The background is mesmerizing, so many galaxies.....

[Hell Hath No Fury]

1. Beautiful!

To think we are the only ones out here is pretty silly, I think.

[aquamarina]

2. I just love these pictures of our magnificent universe

[Rabrrrrrr]

3. This is the kind of stuff that makes me sad.

The universe is a huge, beautiful, amazing place - as is our very own earth. So much to explore, so much to see and learn and experience.

And yet here on earth where we humans are, we fight over idiotic bullshit about religious and nationalistic and racial triumphalism; we fight over utterly ignorant things like whether we should pollute the earth, whether some people shouldn't have health care or access to clean water or food, and whether everyone has a right to live where they want and be self-determined.

So much frakking idiocy that keeps us coming together for what should be our real journey - exploring all the possibilities of the cosmos, from music and art to space exploration to science to thought.

But no, we spend half our budget on ways to kill people, and spend about 98% of our political time fighting the visionless assholes who don't want us to evolve or create a society and world in which exploration would never be considered "optional" and in which leaving people to hunger would never be considered "okay".

Sorry to get political in the science forum, but as soon as I saw that picture, I was washed by sadness that we live in a world in which few people will care about that photo and all that it represents, but will care about who's having sex with whom and how, or care that a brown-skinned person accidentally born somewhere else might come here and actually thrive as a human being.

[zipplewrath]

5. Do realize, it's through time

Do realize that when you look at such a picture, it is a photo "through" time, not a snapshot "in" time. The distances between all of the objects and collections of objects you see is so great that you are looking a things happening hundreds of millions of years apart, and all of them long ago. They could actually be gone by "now".

[Rabrrrrrr]

6. Ummmmm....

okay.

:shrug:

[zipplewrath]

7. Think of it this way

It's a bit like sound. You know, you see something a long way away happen and then you hear it a little later. So, you hear a bunch of different things coming from different distances. You hear them "all at the same time". But the stuff that was
further away, happened before the stuff that was closer.

Same way with that picture. Some galaxies are much closer than others. So some of them you are seeing what they looked like 100 million years ago, and others, that you are looking at in that picture, looked like that 250 million years ago.

[Rabrrrrrr]

9. Yes, I am well-trained in matters of science and physics.

My confusion was more about what it being a picture of the past has to do with my feelings of frustration with a world that would rather fight than explore; confine and destroy rather than evolve into its future.

[Rabrrrrrr]

8. delete - dupe post

[Kaleva]

10. The universe is a deadly, violent place.

While one can appreciate the beauty, one should remember that we humans are quite lucky in avoiding the natural catastrophes the universe is capable of producing so that we can now enjoy the beauty of it.

[MidwestTransplant]

4. One of my favorite videos of all time...definitely worth watching:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgg2tpUVbXQ&feature=related