You've never stared this deep into space before

[Eraser]

This is a picture taken by the Hubble space telescope (click it for bigger version). It's an "extreme deep field" picture. The exposure time is two million seconds (which is 23 days and a few hours). It shows over 5500 galaxies and the most distant objects here are over 13 billion light years away. Also, the faintest star you can see with the naked eye is ten billion times brighter than the faintest galaxies in this picture.
Those are some mind boggling numbers right there.

[lvlshot]http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/images/screen/heic1214a.jpg[/lvlshot]

source

[feedback]

also: It's insane to think about the scale of everything. Some things there are already 13 billion years old. It's too bad all humans don't start their lives with a flythrough tour of the universe so they stop being selfish insane superstitious cunts.

[SoM]

we're also a galaxy, wonder who's watching us, besides the goofment.

they running SETI 2.0 ?

[Don Carlos]

It blows my mind that people still refuse to beleive that aliens exist. I don't mean aliens that have come and put things in southern American peoples asses, or spent 8 seconds flying around the sky at warp speed, I am talking about life on another planet in another galaxy. It almost seems impossible for it not to exist given the scale of everything.

Awesome picture by the way dude

[SoM]

i hope we find LV 426

[Ryoki]

Cool stuff

[xer0s]

Isn't this an old photo?

An amazing photo nonetheless...

[Eraser]

Nope. They've done deep field photo's before with Hubble, but none this deep into space.

[GONNAFISTYA]

Deep Field, Ultra Deep Field, Extreme Deep Field...

Cosmologists and their naming conventions.

[seremtan]

i'm looking forward to the Ultimate Deep Field, when we'll be able to count the beads of sweat on Shatner's forehead as he wipes out Klingons

[xer0s]

lol, Über Deep Field

[Don Carlos]

I vote for Super Hyper Mega Deep Field next

[MKJ]

getting close to Maximum Depth Field bros.

[Plan B]

The tension. I can't stand it. Anal collapse imminent

[xer0s]

Ultra Deep Field wallpaper...

http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/ar ... o0428b.jpg

[Theftbot]

1337 deep field!

[r3t]

what's with the lens flare on the lower right? aliens?

Nah, probably a star that is part of the milky way

[losCHUNK]

[lvlshot]http://[/lvlshot]

what's with the lens flare on the lower right? aliens?

[lvlshot]http://www.nerdragecomic.com/images/ancientaliens.jpg[/lvlshot]

This the view that see's almost to the edge of the universe ?, seeing some of the 1st stars/galaxies that were 'born' ?

Pretty epic

[losCHUNK]

Aye, they're more than likely long dead, pretty cool looking at something that was created towards the beginning of time though

The photo is a sequel to the original "Hubble Ultra Deep Field," a picture the Hubble Space Telescope took in 2003 and 2004 that collected light over many hours to reveal thousands of distant galaxies in what was the deepest view of the universe so far. The XDF goes even farther, peering back 13.2 billion years into the universe's past. The universe is thought to be about 13.7 billion years old.

If we get hubble to 'squint' a little, maybe he can see the extra .5 billion years and see there's another level / final boss

[mrd]

Too bad this isn't in stereo so you could get a better sense of what is where. Still... crazy shit. Also, I thought the universe was only 6000 years old?

[GONNAFISTYA]

Too bad this isn't in stereo so you could get a better sense of what is where.

lol wut?

At the distances involved, there'd be no depth separation or parallax in the image at all. The human eye can barely discern depth separation between mountains in the distance...only the haze tells the eye which mountain is further away...let alone galaxies billions of light years away. I doubt the parallax would change at all if you took the photo from both sides of the Earth's orbit around the Sun.

[xer0s]

Or from one side of our galaxy to the other for that matter...

[GONNAFISTYA]

Pretty much.

We'd just have to wait 100 million years for the second photo.

The parallax they're measuring for these distances are tiny percentages of 1 degree, it'd still be a flat 2D image to the casual observer.

[Tsakali]

but they could still digitally adjust and exaggerate for the effect ...just to get that "better sense" of the positions.
A few years back, some dude took stereo images of clouds, from cameras that were hundreds of feet away, and he fed the resulting image into a standard size binocular thingie and the result was said to be amazing for those who experienced it.

[GONNAFISTYA]

but they could still digitally adjust and exaggerate for the effect ...just to get that "better sense" of the positions.
A few years back, some dude took stereo images of clouds, from cameras that were hundreds of feet away, and he fed the resulting image into a standard size binocular thingie and the result was said to be amazing for those who experienced it.

All I can say to this approach is this: most HDR photography sucks precisely because it exaggerates reality.

It's cool for 5 seconds but you're not teaching anyone anything, you're distorting it. The whole point of the photo is to make you feel humility and awe at the distances achieved, not condense it for the already-narcissistic Big Gulp crowd. Fuck that dude and his binoculars.