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The Deepest Photo Ever Taken

Posted by timothy on from the whoah-dude-that's-deeeeep dept.

Astroturtle writes "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."

3 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. 3.5 Day Exposure? by Anonymous+Canard · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Imagine a Beowulf... um. Seriously, how do you cope with reciprocity failure in a 3.5 day exposure. I would have thought that stray heat or electron flow would turn the whole image to static with such a long exposure. HST must consist of unfathomably cool (literally and figuratively) electronics.

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  2. Big Picture... by HobbitGod42 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Does anyone know if there is a BitTorrent file out for the 128mb TIFF? the nasa servers are a bit slow and I feel my hardware cycles and bandwidth could be of use...

  3. Re:Very impressed... by LMCBoy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually, the really unique thing about this image is the stellar populations. The stars you see in the image are almost all in the Andromeda galaxy (aka M 31), seen here.

    M 31 is 2.2 million light-years away. This is the galaxy that Hubble originally resolved into stars, thereby settling the Shapley-Curtis debate on the true scale of the Universe. However, the stars Hubble saw were the very brightest supergiants in M 31. In this HST image, we see stars 2 magnitudes fainter than the ancient main-sequence turn-off; i.e., stars which are intrinsically fainter than our Sun! This lets us learn a lot about the ages and chemical composition of M 31's halo stars, which turn out to be quite different from the stars in our halo (our halo is entirely composed of ancient, metal-poor stars; M 31's halo contains stars that are only 6 Gyr old, and much more metal-rich than our halo).

    I heard Tom Brown give a talk on this work last week; very cool stuff.

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