Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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).
Congratulations on your purchase of a brand new nigger! If handled properly, your apeman will give years of valuable, if reluctant, service.
INSTALLING YOUR NIGGER.
You should install your nigger differently according to whether you have purchased the field or house model. Field niggers work best in a serial configuration, i.e. chained together. Chain your nigger to another nigger immediately after unpacking it, and don't even think about taking that chain off, ever. Many niggers start singing as soon as you put a chain on them. This habit can usually be thrashed out of them if nipped in the bud. House niggers work best as standalone units, but should be hobbled or hamstrung to prevent attempts at escape. At this stage, your nigger can also be given a name. Most owners use the same names over and over, since niggers become confused by too much data. Rufus, Rastus, Remus, Toby, Carslisle, Carlton, Hey-You!-Yes-you!, Yeller, Blackstar, and Sambo are all effective names for your new buck nigger. If your nigger is a ho, it should be called Latrelle, L'Tanya, or Jemima. Some owners call their nigger hoes Latrine for a joke. Pearl, Blossom, and Ivory are also righteous names for nigger hoes. These names go straight over your nigger's head, by the way.
CONFIGURING YOUR NIGGER
Owing to a design error, your nigger comes equipped with a tongue and vocal chords. Most niggers can master only a few basic human phrases with this apparatus - "muh dick" being the most popular. However, others make barking, yelping, yapping noises and appear to be in some pain, so you should probably call a vet and have him remove your nigger's tongue. Once de-tongued your nigger will be a lot happier - at least, you won't hear it complaining anywhere near as much. Niggers have nothing interesting to say, anyway. Many owners also castrate their niggers for health reasons (yours, mine, and that of women, not the nigger's). This is strongly recommended, and frankly, it's a mystery why this is not done on the boat
HOUSING YOUR NIGGER.
Your nigger can be accommodated in cages with stout iron bars. Make sure, however, that the bars are wide enough to push pieces of nigger food through. The rule of thumb is, four niggers per square yard of cage. So a fifteen foot by thirty foot nigger cage can accommodate two hundred niggers. You can site a nigger cage anywhere, even on soft ground. Don't worry about your nigger fashioning makeshift shovels out of odd pieces of wood and digging an escape tunnel under the bars of the cage. Niggers never invented the shovel before and they're not about to now. In any case, your nigger is certainly too lazy to attempt escape. As long as the free food holds out, your nigger is living better than it did in Africa, so it will stay put. Buck niggers and hoe niggers can be safely accommodated in the same cage, as bucks never attempt sex with black hoes.
FEEDING YOUR NIGGER.
Your Nigger likes fried chicken, corn bread, and watermelon. You should therefore give it none of these things because its lazy ass almost certainly doesn't deserve it. Instead, feed it on porridge with salt, and creek water. Your nigger will supplement its diet with whatever it finds in the fields, other niggers, etc. Experienced nigger owners sometimes push watermelon slices through the bars of the nigger cage at the end of the day as a treat, but only if all niggers have worked well and nothing has been stolen that day. Mike of the Old Ranch Plantation reports that this last one is a killer, since all niggers steal something almost every single day of their lives. He reports he doesn't have to spend much on free watermelon for his niggers as a result. You should never allow your nigger meal breaks while at work, since if it stops work for more than ten minutes it will need to be retrained. You would be surprised how long it takes to teach a nigger to pick cotton. You really would. Coffee beans? Don't ask. You have no idea.
MAKING YOUR NIGGER WORK.
Niggers are very, very averse to work of any kind. The nigger's most
The mind boggles. How anybody can believe we are here all alone, I don't know.
there is nowhere left to hide.
greed, fear & ego (in any order) are unprecedented evile's primary weapons. those, along with deception & coercion, helps most of us remain (unwittingly?) dependent on its' life0cidal hired goons' agenda. most of yOUR dwindling resources are being squandered on the 'wars', & continuation of the billionerrors stock markup FraUD/pyramid schemes. nobody ever mentions the real long term costs of those debacles in both life & any notion of prosperity for us, or our children. not to mention the abuse of the consciences of those of us who still have one. see you on the other side of it. the lights are coming up all over now. the fairytail is winding down now. let your conscience be yOUR guide. you can be more helpful than you might have imagined. we now have some choices. meanwhile; don't forget to get a little more oxygen on yOUR brain, & look up in the sky from time to time, starting early in the day. there's lots going on up there.
we note that yahoo deletes some of its' (relevant) stories sooner than others. maybe they're short of disk space, or something?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081106/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/meltdown_who_pays;_ylt=A2KIR3MR9hJJ3YkAGhms0NUE
http://news.google.com/?ncl=1216734813&hl=en&topic=n
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/09/23/what.matters.thirst/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/opinion/31mon1.html?em&ex=1199336400&en=c4b5414371631707&ei=5087%0A
(deleted)http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080918/ap_on_re_us/tent_cities;_ylt=A0wNcyS6yNJIZBoBSxKs0NUE
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/world/29amnesty.html?hp
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/06/02/nasa.global.warming.ap/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/weather/06/05/severe.weather.ap/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/weather/06/02/honore.preparedness/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/09/28/what.matters.meltdown/index.html#cnnSTCText
http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/books/10/07/atwood.debt/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/opinion/01dowd.html?em&ex=1212638400&en=744b7cebc86723e5&ei=5087%0A
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/06/05/senate.iraq/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/washington/17contractor.html?hp
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/world/middleeast/03kurdistan.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
(deleted, still in google cache)http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080708/cheney_climate.html
http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20080805/pl_politico/12308;_ylt=A0wNcxTPdJhILAYAVQms0NUE
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081107/ts_alt_afp/environmentclimatewarmingatlantic_081107145344
(deleted)http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080903/ts_nm/environment_arctic_dc;_ylt=A0wNcwhhcb5It3EBoy2s0NUE
(talk about cowardlly race fixing/bad theater/fiction?) http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/19/news/economy/sec_short_selling/index.htm?cnn=yes
http://us.lrd.yahoo.com/_ylt=ApTbxRfLnscxaGGuCocWlwq7YWsA/SIG=11qicue6l/**http%3A//biz.yahoo.com/ap/081006/meltdown_kashkari.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/opinion/04sat1.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
(the teaching of hate as a way of 'life' synonymous with failed dictatorships) http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081004/ap_on_re_us/newspapers_islam_dvd;_ylt=A0wNcwWdfudITHkACAus0NUE
(some yoga & yogurt makes killing/getting killed less stressful) http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081007/ap_on_re_us/warrior_mind;_ylt=A0wNcw9iXutIPkMBwzGs0NUE
(the old bait & switch...your share of the resulting 'product' is a fairytail nightmare?)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081011/ap_on_bi_ge/where_s_the_money;_ylt=A0wNcwJGwvFIZAQAE6ms0NUE
it's time to get real now. A LOT of energy/resource has been squandered in attempts to keep US in the dark. in the end (give or take a few 1000 years), the creators will prevail (world without end, etc...), as it has always been. the process of gaining yOUR release from the current hostage situation may not be what you might think it is. butt of course, many of US don't know, or care what a precarious/fatal situati
Looking at the images, anyone else see all the galaxies that are in stringy lines, like semen floating around in your bath water?
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?
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
But won't this resolution be matched by mobile phone cameras in about ten minutes?
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
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.
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)
And that's what most of the world is saying today.
No sig today...
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"
Why do star photos have crosses over bigger stars?
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!