The Hubble Deep Field (HDF) is an image of a small region in the constellation Ursa Major, constructed from a series of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. It covers an area 2.5 arcminutes across, about one 24-millionth of the whole sky, which is equivalent in angular size to a 65 mm tennis ball at a distance of 100 meters. The image was assembled from 342 separate exposures taken with the Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 over ten consecutive days between December 18 and December 28, 1995.
The field is so small that only a few foreground stars in the Milky Way lie within it; thus, almost all of the 3,000 objects in the image are galaxies, some of which are among the youngest and most distant known.
3,000 galaxies in an image that only includes one 24-millionth of the night sky? Why, there must be billions of galaxies then!
It just makes me so very sad, that there's so much out there and we'll never see it. Hundreds of sextillions of stars, hundreds of quadrillions of rocky planets, millions of nebulae, black holes, supernovae, comets, distant worlds teeming with strange, alien life, and yet Americans spend more money in two weeks on war than we do in an entire year on space exploration.
Sometimes I seriously wonder if the Purpose of gravity is to keep weak species out of the space exploration business.
_
0 comments:
Post a Comment