... by light years.
This is such an extraordinary photo that I had to pass the link along:
http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2003/15/images/a/formats/full_jpg.jpg?blah
This is an 84-hour exposure from the Hubble telescope, centered about 1 minute
SE of M31 Andromeda. From Sky & Telescope:
The Deepest Photo Ever Taken
By Alan M. MacRobert
May 7, 2003 | Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope's powerful new
Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) have taken the
deepest visible-light image ever made of the sky.
The 3.5-day (84-hour) exposure captures stars as faint as 31st magnitude,
according to Tom M. Brown (Space Telescope Science
Institute), who headed the eight-person team that took the picture. This is a
little more than 1 magnitude (2.5 times)
fainter than the epochal Hubble Deep Fields, which were made with the Hubble's
Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. It is 6
billion times fainter than what can be seen with the naked eye.
Brown and his colleagues chose to point at a spot 10 southeast of M31, the
Great Andromeda Galaxy, in order to get a census
of faint stars populating M31's outer halo. The full ACS image is about 3.1
arcminutes square, the size of a sand grain held
at arm's length against the sky. The ACS magnifies this small field into a vast
panorama of some 300,000 stars and thousands
of faint background galaxies. At M31's distance of 2.5 million light-years, the
faintest of the stars are slightly less
luminous than our Sun. A large fraction of the most distant galaxies appear
patchy and irregular, testimony to the collisions
and mergers in the early universe that built up the familiar galaxies we see
closer around us today.
It's a big download (5mb), but worth it.
Cheers.
--
Michael D. Porter
Roswell, NM (yes, _that_ Roswell)
[mailto:mporter@zianet.com]
Don't let people drive you crazy when you know it's within walking distance.
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