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Very Large Telescope Captures New 27-Megapixel Deep Field
xyz writes "European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope has captured the deepest ground based U-band image of the universe yet. The image contains more than 27 million pixels and is the result of 55 hours of observations with the VIMOS instrument. 'Galaxies were detected that are a billion times fainter than the unaided eye can see and over a range of colours not directly observable by the eye. This deep image has been essential to the discovery of a large number of new galaxies that are so far away that they are seen as they were when the Universe was only 2 billion years old.'"
Oh my god. It's full of pixels!
Hard to believe, looking at this, that there could ever be a shortage of anything.
My UID is prime!
Seriously, Slashdot, pointing to an article that contains a link to the 80 MB TIFF image at full resolution. Feeling a bit sadistic today, are we? Oh well, I'm rather early so I clicked it nonetheless. Feeling like a bit of a egocentric sadist myself today.
It works without a hitch in the AlternaTIFF TIFF Image Viewer. You can clearly see the galaxies, but otherwise it is a large sheet of colored dots (as expected I suppose).
The second link provides a 78MB TIFF (and a more modest but same-resolution 30MB JPEG) image.
However, it's a dinky low-resolution image one could have captured with a CCTV camera. Come on, you can do better than that.
I'm sorry, but what? The second link in the story has links to 6480 x 4236 JPGs and TIFs, which calculates to 27MP, the file sizes are 31MB and 79MB, respectively.
Normally, I would agree that web stories normally fall short with photos and multimedia, but it's just not true here.
The mind boggles. How anybody can believe we are here all alone, I don't know.
Did you perhaps neglect to click on the thumbnail in the article? Or even click the second link the summary? The 6480 x 4239 full resolution image is readily available as a JPEG and a TIFF.
Oh cool I didn't see those links
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
If you had clicked on the image in the article, you'd have been taken there automatically. Exactly what the hell is it that you were expecting? A full resolution image above the article text?
Looking at the images, anyone else see all the galaxies that are in stringy lines, like semen floating around in your bath water?
I'm guessing you missed the link that was included in both the slashdot summary and the article!
By reading this signature, you hereby agree with the content of the above comment.
This new "picture" is taken in UV for which the Hubble ultra deep field is still the deepest image taken in visible wavelengths. Which provides, if you believe the current age estimate of the universe (13.73 ± 0.12 billion years old) means Hubble is still going back further. 0.73 Billion years vs 2 billion years since the beginning of the universe.
Just to give a sense of perspective in case you read the title and went so what?
My suggestion to the Slashdot administrators : add "yOUR" to your lameness filter. Problem solved.
You just got troll'd!
This is my new favorite image. Thank you ESO and the VLT staff.
Don't let them trick you into thinking you need MORE megapixels. It's all a feature bloat trick, sales people love to use to make the devices more expensive. No really, I love the deep field/space research. Amazing imagines. I thought Hubble was broken again? I guess they fixed it.
Maybe I missed something, but how is this impressive?
Considering that there are commercial cameras on the market that have resolutions of 50+ megapixels for "just" $40,000 (not much for professional scientists or astronomers). It seems like a fairly simple thing to modify for use in the UV spectrum (maybe that's the part we are supposed to be impressed with?).
Perhaps they meant gigapixels?
Shortage of time.
:).
And here I am wasting it on Slashdot
I know a man can see various things in a random set of dots that are not really there, but what about these `filaments' of galaxies?
What are these?
still can't use this as my desktop background without tiling.
Yeah, I know..... a lot....
What I mean is, if I look up in the sky, how big of a patch of the sky does this picture cover? The size of the full moon? Bigger? Smaller than a grain of sand at arms length?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The standard cue for a clickable image is a 2-pixel-wide blue border around it. Why would they go through the pain of overriding the default but still make it clickable? It's just not practical to mouse over every image on every website to know if they're a link of not.
Nice time for new wallpaper on my laptop :)
o_O
Can someone throw together a google maps mashup?
Excellent name - simple and straightforward. They should have a contest for naming the next model. Put me down for "Amazing Freaking Ginormous Wonderscope"
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Phil Plait has quite a bit to say about this image:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/11/07/voyaging-deep-into-the-universe/
"Scanning the full-res image is incredible. There's so much to see! Each dot, each smudge, is a full-blown galaxy, a collection of billions of stars. They're very, very far away; some of these galaxies are estimated to be 10 billion light years distant; you're seeing them as they were just a couple of billion years after the Universe itself began, and the faintest are one-billionth as bright as objects you can see with your own eye."
He also talks quite a bit about his favorite astronomical event - gamma-ray bursts.
What's a billion times "I can't see shit?"
I count galaxies in 1/8 x 1/14 of that image to be 150. In the whole image there are approx. 16800 galaxies. Since this is 14x21 arcminutes and 1 degree is 60minutes, hence this is 0.3 degree of 360 degree sky, I thinkg there are... 6.752*10^9 galaxies in the visible universe!
Did anyone notice the name of the press officer?
Dr. Henri Boffin.
Nominative determinism in action.
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
It's exactly that thought process which leads to running out of (or destroying) resources.
27 megapixels is almost consumer grade today. Why so low?
Looking at the full-res picture I was thinking how one could test for the statistical significance of the apparent `filaments'.
Some of these seem quite amazing, stretching and bending for quite some distance.
Because that blue border is hideous and should always be overridden. They could have included a caption letting you know what clicking it would do, however.
Is it just me or is that 76mb tif sadly lacking in quality? Looks like a lossy jpeg. Here's something off the cuff from my wallpapers folder, redstar that has more detail and is under 1mb.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
If you want to do the owner of the website a favor, go to TPB and search for this image if you need/want it in full size, i suppose this will cause less traffic for them.
(I assume that it is something like public domain anyway)
Isn't the new Canon Eos dSLR capable of producing 22MP pictures? I'm sorry, bu only gigapixels impress me these days. http://www.gigapxl.org/gallery.htm
And that's what most of the world is saying today.
No sig today...
If an image is sharp, then you weren't pushing the limits of the instrument in the first place.
I don't know about your system, but with mine all I have to do is mouse over the pic to see the pointer change into a little hand. Tells me there is a link.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
Picture-perfect Crystalline Entity in that "Fistful of Data". But, i somehow think we are still quite a way from a lateral sensor array...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
How about just filtering any post that uses a lot of big words yet has indications of brain damage like abbreviating every other "and" to "&" (or "you" to "u")?
Why do star photos have crosses over bigger stars?
6480 x 4236
Almost as big as my little 14" CRT at 6400 x 4800 running on the old 386. With the tendency for screens to get wider, an aspect ratio of 6400 x 4200 scales nicely from 1600 x 1050 so we can see this picture nicely on an 8 ft monitor. About the same size as the screen in the USS Enterprise?
If you look closely, there's a little banner in the galaxy 342-HITHR that says "Happy 2000000000th! In 9000000000 years, there will be intelligence that will know what this amount of time means."
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Q: What's worse than a racist?
A: A racist with too damned much time on their hands.
Nothing looks lossy when you put it at 642x516 pixels like the tiny, tiny image you provided. Try it with any deep field photo. You can also take video game screens and make them thumbnail size, and they look real.
I'm mildly bothered by the 27 megapixel metric, as it tells you nothing about the scope of the image. I can take a 10 MP picture of the sky with my digital camera and half those pixels will be wasted on the trees around me, and the rest won't give us any new information that anyone else can't get. It would be interesting to know the solid angle, or the field-of-view measurement that is associated with the image. If you are taking a 5000x5000 picture of something 1 light year across, from 10 billion light years away, that requires a hell of a tiny field of view. Approximately 100 picoradians of resolution. If you have that type of resolution, the picture could only be 5 megapixels and probably still contain a plethora of interesting stuff.
It's a nice stress test for your browser. I can remember the days when Firefox would crash trying to load such a JPG.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Some corrections, because the GP confused linear and solid angles:
14 linear arcminutes * 21 linear arcminutes = 294 sqare arcminutes
1 square degree = (60 linear arcminutes)^2 = 3600 sqare arcminutes
294 square arcminutes / 3600 sqare arcminutes ~= .08167 square degrees
there are ~41253 square degrees in a sphere, only this fraction of a sphere is subtended by the picture:
(294 square arcminutes) / (41253 square degrees) ~= 1.980*10^-6
As someone stated elsewhere, this is about 1/500,000 of the sky (i.e. the celestial sphere).
So we count the number of galaxies encountered in this secion, then divide by the fraction subtended; using GP's estimate:
16,800 / (1.980*10^-6) gives ~8.49*10^9 galaxies
However, about 2 orders of magnitude more galaxies are in the field, though only ~16,800 galaxies are detected in this particular image of the field. The number of galaxies in the *observable* universe is at least on the order of 100 billion (10^11), per other, more sensitive surveys with more rigorous counting methods than a quick subsampling as performed by a human examining an image visually.
Next:
...with an average of 40 billion stars in a galaxy...
This is lower than I've encountered. The average galactic mass is about 100 billion solar masses, and the average stellar mass is about .5 solar masses*, so the the average number of stars in a galaxy is is on the order of 100~200 billion.
...it is conjectured that there are some very small galaxies, making the average much smaller than our own Milky Way...
Actually, it is fairly well established that there are indeed many such "small" galaxies. But though the number of "extremely large" (trillions to tens of trillions, versus hundred billions for the Milky Way) galaxies is small, the contribution to the mean ("average") number of stars per galaxy is disproportionately large because they themselves are disproportionately large. This is the nature of the arithmetic mean: a few highly weighted outliers skew the mean more than the median, and the median more than the mode. That's precisely why the "average" number of stars per galaxy is actually on the order of the Milky Way.
(* Note that the "average" stellar mass is skewed upward by the few but extremely massive stars just as galactic mass is. A "typical" star is smaller than the .5-solar mass "average" star; the vast majority of stars are smallish red dwarfs, with the sun being more massive than at least ~90% of stars, if only by a little in the range of stellar masses from ~.04 to ~150.)
So:
~(10^11 galaxies) * ~(10^11 stars/galaxy) = ~10^22 stars
The highest *reasonable* estimates I've seen yield a little over 5*10^22 stars, so on the order of 10^23 stars is still conceivable.
But with a lot of pixels available to crop and match to your screen resolution. Don't forget to say sorry to all these little green men whose homeworlds wasn't included to your screen.
Good guess, but no cigar.
Somehow, I feel like a feeble eyed old man with a cane, putting on me specks to see those faint, distant lights in the fog. Marvelous!
When you manage to mount a 120,000mm lens on a 1DS MkIII/5D MkII and take a photo that captures an object as it existed eleven billion years ago, please let me know.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?