Hubble takes the biggest image ever of Andromeda at 1.5 billion pixels

The Hubble Space Telescope's image of the Andromeda Galaxy is the sharpest and biggest image ever taken of it. Click to expand but for an even closer view go to the Hubble website and use the zoom tool.

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have released the sharpest and biggest image ever taken of the Andromeda galaxy. The image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope has an amazing 1.5 billion pixels that would require 600 HD television screens to display in full.

This panorama is the product of the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) program. Images were obtained from viewing the galaxy in near-ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared wavelengths, using the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard Hubble.

The view shows the galaxy in its natural visible-light color as photographed in red and blue filters.

This image is too large to display at full resolution and is best viewed here, using the zoom tool.

Andromeda Galaxy, otherwise known as Messier 31, is a large spiral galaxy that lies "just" 2.5 million light years from Earth. Hubble's detailed view captures more than 100 million stars and thousands of star clusters embedded in a section of the galaxy’s pancake-shaped disc stretching across over 40,000 light-years.

The whole galaxy contains over one thousand billion stars.

But the image represents just a third of the giant galaxy. It traces the galaxy from its central galactic bulge on the left of the image, where stars are densely packed together, across lanes of stars and dust to the sparser outskirts of its outer disc on the right.

Imagery of this sophistication has more than a "wow" factor. It will help astronomers interpret the light from the many galaxies that have a similar structure but lie much further away from us than Andromeda.

 

love this.

And in before HCP says that he needs a high-quality photo of Uranus.

 

It's Photoshoped you know. I'm pretty sure the image was black and white before they enhanced it.

 

I like science.

http://hubblesite.org/reference_desk/faq/answer.php.id=93&cat=topten
http://hubblesite.org/gallery/behind_the_pictures/meaning_of_color/index.php

Taking color pictures with the Hubble Space Telescope is much more complex than taking color pictures with a traditional camera. For one thing, Hubble doesn't use color film — in fact, it doesn't use film at all. Rather, its cameras record light from the universe with special electronic detectors. These detectors produce images of the cosmos not in color, but in shades of black and white.

Finished color images are actually combinations of two or more black-and-white exposures to which color has been added during image processing.

The colors in Hubble images, which are assigned for various reasons, aren't always what we'd see if we were able to visit the imaged objects in a spacecraft. We often use color as a tool, whether it is to enhance an object's detail or to visualize what ordinarily could never be seen by the human eye.

 

The technology they use may be more related to what can survive and function in the harsh conditions of space. Film exposed to x-rays for years on end wouldn't turn out too good. The effect of cosmic rays on color sensors may not be desirable, either.

In any case, the photos are amazing, but it is interesting to note they are enhanced.

 

#SpacePorn?