Largest / most detailed image of a spiral galaxy

[deep]

of Messier 101 aka the Pinwheel Galaxy

The giant spiral disk of stars, dust and gas is 170,000 light-years across or nearly twice the diameter of our Milky Way. The galaxy is estimated to contain at least one trillion stars. Approximately 100 billion of these stars alone might be like our Sun in terms of temperature and lifetime. Hubble’s high resolution reveals millions of the galaxy’s individual stars in this image.

The Pinwheel Galaxy lies in the northern circumpolar constellation, Ursa Major (The Great Bear) at a distance of 25 million light-years from Earth. We are seeing the galaxy from Earth today as it was at the beginning of Earth's Miocene Period when mammals flourished and the Mastodon first appeared on Earth. The galaxy fills an area on the sky of one-fifth the area of the full moon.

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2006/10/image/a

See links down the left hand side for different image options

 

[alma]

also, there are some great earth images at this site: NASA earth observatory

thumbnail size below (desktop sizes are on the site):


Fires in Northern Mexico

 

[Kazoo]

Cool!

 

[~Loress~]

awesome!

 

[JEMZ]

I **heart** Hubble

 

[TaCk OnE?]

I'm downloading the massive 58 meg compressed jpg (450+ megs as a tiff!!!) of the whole thing....can zoom in really tight...should be hype....slow servers though, 4k/sec....

 

[patri©k]

a couple of my favs.

The Sombrero Galaxy: M104

source & description - http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap000228.html

The Sleeping Beauty Galaxy : M64

source & description - http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap040211.html

"The Sleeping Beauty galaxy may appear peaceful at first sight but it is actually tossing and turning. In an unexpected twist, recent observations have shown that the gas in the outer regions of this photogenic spiral is rotating in the opposite direction from all of the stars!"

 

[SmoothOperator]

It's mind boggling looking at those pictures, and convincing yourself they're REAL. So cool.

 

[~Loress~]

our closest galaxy..

Spiral Galaxy NGC 300

Explanation: NGC 300 is so interesting because it is so normal. An Sc-type spiral galaxy in the nearby Sculptor group of galaxies, NGC 300 shows typical flowing blue spiral arms, an expected compact nucleus, and the requisite amount of stars, star clusters, and nebulae. Therefore, studying NGC 300 should indicate how, exactly, a normal spiral galaxy works. Toward this goal, NGC 300 and the surrounding area were studied in exquisite detail, creating and combining a series of high-resolution images to create the above conglomerate picture. NGC 300 lies only 7 million light years away, spans nearly the same amount of sky as the full moon, and is visible with a small telescope toward the constellation of Sculptor.

 

[JEMZ]

 

[~Loress~]

wow.. the cat's eye is pretty fuckin cool!

 

[deep]

unfortunately the cat's eye nebula is a star that died over a thousand years ago

 

[JEMZ]

It's a good thing the universe is really big and by comparison, light does not move that fast.

 

[deep]

Yeah, no kidding. I think the math and physics of these pretty pictures really amplifies their effect. Like all those pretty wisps of colour in the cat's eye nebula, the ones that look like slow moving smoke...those are solar winds moving at somewhere around 2000 kilometers per second

 

[JEMZ]

For sure man, even when I look at the sky I always get lost in the thought that I may be looking at ancient light that was sent from a star 10 000 years ago and the star long died before its light ever passed earth


1 light year = 9.4605284 × 1015 meters = 9,600,000,000,000 (approx) KM = big

 

[TaCk OnE?]

this jumbo image is taking hours to download....I better be able to spot life in there....

 

[~Loress~]

i think i see spence's mom..

 

[JEMZ]

Yeah Damon... they'd better be waiving to you

 

[Spinsah]

i think i see spence's mom..

she's got a huge nebulass

 

[JEMZ]

crabs?

 

[~Loress~]

so i see!

 

[TaCk OnE?]

hey spence's mom, nice asstaroids

 

[G-FrEsH]

For sure man, even when I look at the sky I always get lost in the thought that I may be looking at ancient light that was sent from a star 10 000 years ago and the star long died before its light ever passed earth


1 light year = 9.4605284 × 1015 meters = 9,600,000,000,000 (approx) KM = big

I thought of that also... looking at stars and wondering.. do any of these stars warm an earth like ours. I usually go in further detail but end up sending myself in a circle.

And for that one light year... thats fucked, just goes to show how advanced we are, but aren't at the same time. Takes months to sail to Australia, when yet it only takes a day to fly there. It takes months to sail to Mars, we just need to figure out how to fly there.

 

[daddyiwantchocolate]

Great link deep!

 

[JEMZ]

And for that one light year... thats fucked

Yeah and for the record, I can't write powers so it came out 1015 metres....but that measurement is 9.4605284 × 10(to the power of 15)
meters

As for Spence's mom, she's been helping all creatures earn their Orion brown belts for eons