A galaxy in perspective
One of the things that’s very difficult to appreciate is the relative sizes and distances of celestial objects. After all, their sizes and distances aren’t remotely small enough for us to appreciate. As a result, everything we see looks in some way compressed – one object in an image may just as easily be twice [...]
The deepest view of the universe: the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field
How deep into the universe have we looked? As of today, this deep: This is the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field, (XDF), and it’s a masterwork ten years in the making*. What you’re seeing is what you get when you take a very long exposure with two of Hubble’s best cameras of a region of the [...]
Magnifying the Universe
“Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space, listen…” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams Now that we’re up, up and away, a [...]
