A Stunning Photograph: No Human Has Seen Such a Thing

One of my most vivid memories as a child was the time our family paid a visit to the telescope and observatory on top of Mt. Palomar in Southern California. I'm not sure how old I was, perhaps 8 or so, and I already had a mania for all things astronomy. We bought some postcards that day, two of which I remember clearly. They were actual photographs taken by the Palomar telescope, and included three of the planets (Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) on one card. The other was a photograph of the Andromeda Galaxy. I kept those cards for years, and they may still be in one of the boxes in my closet. I was pleased to find that it only took a moment with a search engine to find the photograph of the Andromeda Galaxy itself:

Many thanks to Palomar Skies for posting this 1959 photograph of the Andromeda Galaxy

At the time (the mid-1960s) I thought one could increase the magnification of the photographs by simply looking at them with a magnifying glass, and later when I had the chance, a microscope. I sadly soon learned the difference between magnification and resolution. The best telescope in the world at the time could only discern the fuzziness of the hundreds of billions of stars, because the atmosphere was too turbulent to allow higher resolution photographs. As far as I knew we'd never be able to resolve individual stars in a galaxy other than our own. I went on to study different things, but I never forgot my desire to see another galaxy up close outside our Milky Way.

That desire became a reality today. With thanks and accolades to NASA and the European Space Agency.

Go to this site: http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1502a/zoomable/. Give it time to load. It is a photograph of the Andromeda Galaxy with 1.5 billion pixels (as noted at IFLS, the average high resolution monitor has just over 2 million pixels). The photograph resolves individual stars in the Andromeda Galaxy. The zoomed photograph contains 100 million stars, and yet covers only about 10% of the entire galaxy. You can download the entire photograph, but you would need around 4.3 gigabytes on your computer to store it. And need around 600 high definition screens to show the entire image.

 http://ohstarstuff.tumblr.com/post/107259320049/sharpest-view-of-the-andromeda-galaxy-ever-the

This is an extraordinary accomplishment, perhaps the most detailed picture ever produced. The first view in human history of the totality of stars in a galaxy outside our own. I doubt that 100 million people have looked at this photo yet, which means you could choose just about any star in the zoomed close up and realize you are the only human who has ever observed this star. The only person who has wondered what planets it has, whether life ever emerged on the planet's surface. Sure, there are enough stars in our own galaxy to do that sort of thing, but before this picture existed, you couldn't do it out there.

In 2018, a new space telescope, the Webb, will launch, which will have mirrors amounting to a diameter of 21.3 feet, compared to Hubble's 7.8 feet. Thirty years elapsed between the best photo ever taken from Earth of the Andromeda Galaxy, the picture from my childhood, and this remarkable image from the Hubble. The Webb Space Telescope represents thirty years of technological advances beyond that of the Hubble Telescope. What incredible things will we see next?

The Winged Messenger: Appearing Now on Your Western Horizon!

I saw something I've only seen once before in my life last night: the planet Mercury. It's not that hard to see it, but being so close to the sun, it must be at the highest point in its orbit to avoid being lost in the glare of twilight. Basically, I've missed it over the years from sheer laziness.

On the other hand, it's there. It doesn't look like much in a telescope, especially the kind of scopes I've had access to over the years. And satellites had only visited the planet once while I was growing up, and the satellite was only able to map a bit less than half the planet. It doesn't have showy rings or moons.

Even last night, I took only a few pictures of Mercury, but spent most of my time capturing the beautiful crescent moon (below). Mercury is basically the poor stepchild when compared to the other terrestrial planets of Venus (bathed in cloudy mystery), Earth, and Mars (we are leaving tire marks all over it right now, looking for signs of water and/or past life).

This is the joy of living in the times we are, though. We are in the midst of a voyage of discovery that humans can only do once in our history: to explore our Solar System in detail for the first time. Mercury actually is an interesting planet, and it has offered up a few surprises, like complicated surface structures, including large fault scarps, and a magnetic field. It even has a few wispy bits of an atmosphere and possible ice deposits in the polar regions. We are learning about these things because we've had a second satellite, Messenger, that has been orbiting the planet for the last two years (it arrived in 2008, but it took a complicated series of passes to establish an orbit in 2011).

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/messenger/multimedia/detail_first114075114076.html

All our planets have interesting stories, and it's more meaningful if you have actually made the effort to see the planets with your own eyes. Steven Schimmrich at Hudson Valley Geologist has a nice post on how to see Mercury over the next week or so (the post is what got me off my couch to have a look). To learn more about NASA's Messenger mission, check out this website.