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.'"

Comments

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[kimvette]

I was expecting the article to not include a photo, which is so typical of stories covering notable events, where the author will go to great lengths in describing what makes the image great and then neglect to include a copy. It's almost like a strip tease, I guess.

But in this case, it's different. He discusses the high resolution and why it's so important to the field of astronomy, and an image is even included. However, it's a dinky low-resolution image one could have captured with a CCTV camera. Come on, you can do better than that. Couldn't you include at least a 100% crop inset if you won't fork up the full resolution image? Show us a small section of the photo at 100% resolution so we the reader can get an idea of what is visible in the photo. If I want to see a view like the one provided I'd grab a child's telescope from Toys R Us.

Call me cynical

[Goodgerster]

But won't this resolution be matched by mobile phone cameras in about ten minutes?