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Way, way off-topic...

To: triumphs@autox.team.net, spitfires@autox.team.net, fot@autox.team.net
Subject: Way, way off-topic...
From: "Michael D. Porter" <mporter@zianet.com>
Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 10:31:04 -0600
... by light years.

This is such an extraordinary photo that I had to pass the link along:

http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2003/15/images/a/formats/full_jpg.jpg?blah

This is an 84-hour exposure from the Hubble telescope, centered about 1 minute 
SE of M31 Andromeda. From Sky & Telescope:


The Deepest Photo Ever Taken

By Alan M. MacRobert

May 7, 2003 | Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope's powerful new 
Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) have taken the
deepest visible-light image ever made of the sky. 

The 3.5-day (84-hour) exposure captures stars as faint as 31st magnitude, 
according to Tom M. Brown (Space Telescope Science
Institute), who headed the eight-person team that took the picture. This is a 
little more than 1 magnitude (2.5 times)
fainter than the epochal Hubble Deep Fields, which were made with the Hubble's 
Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. It is 6
billion times fainter than what can be seen with the naked eye.

Brown and his colleagues chose to point at a spot 10 southeast of M31, the 
Great Andromeda Galaxy, in order to get a census
of faint stars populating M31's outer halo. The full ACS image is about 3.1 
arcminutes square, the size of a sand grain held
at arm's length against the sky. The ACS magnifies this small field into a vast 
panorama of some 300,000 stars and thousands
of faint background galaxies. At M31's distance of 2.5 million light-years, the 
faintest of the stars are slightly less
luminous than our Sun. A large fraction of the most distant galaxies appear 
patchy and irregular, testimony to the collisions
and mergers in the early universe that built up the familiar galaxies we see 
closer around us today.

It's a big download (5mb), but worth it. 

Cheers.

-- 
Michael D. Porter
Roswell, NM (yes, _that_ Roswell)
[mailto:mporter@zianet.com]

Don't let people drive you crazy when you know it's within walking distance.

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