My God, it’s full of galaxies

The VISTA telescope in Chile recently took a photo of the sky that contains over 200,000 galaxies. For reference, the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field image shows only about 10,000 galaxies (but sees further back in time, I think).

I’ve spent years studying all this, and it still sometimes gets to me: just how flipping BIG the Universe is! And this picture is still just a tiny piece of it: it’s 1.2 x 1.5 degrees in size, which means it’s only 0.004% of the sky! And it’s not even complete: more observations of this region are planned, allowing astronomers to see even deeper yet.

Here’s a full view of the image that looks sorta unimpressive:

You can download the original 17,000 x 11,000 pixel image here (250 Mb, yo) for the full effect. As a preview, this is several levels of zoom in…just a tiny part of the full image.

• astronomy
• physics
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• space