Space is a place and concept that I understand in it’s basic form, but ultimately the scope and scale is so beyond my understanding that I tend to get panicky when looking at high resolution photos of deep space. Enter my nightmare:
On January 5th NASA released the Hubble Telescope’s latest feat: the largest photo ever compiled, and it features our closest neighboring galaxy, Andromeda. Andromeda is over 2 million light years away from earth, and the resulting photo is a composite of “7,398 exposures taken over 411 individual pointings…The Hubble Space Telescope is powerful enough to resolve individual stars in a 61,000-light-year-long stretch of the galaxy’s pancake-shaped disk. It’s like photographing a beach and resolving individual grains of sand. And there are lots of stars in this sweeping view — over 100 million, with some of them in thousands of star clusters seen embedded in the disk.”
I mean…what else could anyone possibly say? I don’t think we’ve created words that could possibly describe the scope of what we are looking at. It’s so much more than ‘awesome’ and ‘incredible’. It’s just…mind boggling.
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