rose petals for paper

geekwhistle:

I could literally stare at this all day. These pictures make me feel like painting.

(Source: fucksoul)

(Source: fucksoul)

ikenbot:

Milky Way Shows 84 Million Stars in 9 Billion Pixels

Side Note: The two images shown above are mere crop outs from ESA’s recent hit: The 9 Billion Pixel Image of 84 Million Stars. These two focus on the bright center of the image for the purpose of highlighting what a peak at 84,000,000 stars looks like.

Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory in Chile have released a breathtaking new photograph showing the central area of our Milky Way galaxy. The photograph shows a whopping 84 million stars in an image measuring 108500×81500, which contains nearly 9 billion pixels.

It’s actually a composite of thousands of individual photographs shot with the observatory’s VISTA survey telescope, the same camera that captured the amazing 55-hour exposure. Three different infrared filters were used to capture the different details present in the final image.

The VISTA’s camera is sensitive to infrared light, which allows its vision to pierce through much of the space dust that blocks the view of ordinary optical telescope/camera systems.

source

(Source: kenobi-wan-obi)

sciencesoup:

The Earliest Galaxies

In 2003 and 2004, the Hubble Space Telescope photographed a tiny portion of the sky in the constellation of Fornax, revealing what the first galaxies looked like. The first image above is the result, named the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UDF). Mind-blowingly, nearly every point of light is a galaxy, and yet it’s just a minute sampling of the entire sky. These galaxies are ancient, up to 13 billion years old, meaning that the light we see left the galaxies far before Earth was even formed—the image had an exposure of nearly 3 months to collect this distant light. The UDF was the deepest ever image of the universe until its sequel was released just recently. The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), the second image above, patches together 2,000 Hubble images taken over 10 years, all of one patch of sky in the Fornax constellation. It adds 5,500 of the faintest and most distant galaxies to the UDF’s count of 10,000, some of which are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see. The image goes even deeper, peering back 13.2 billion years—just half a billion years after the universe began. The XDF allows us to explore further back in time than ever before, studying the birth and evolution of stars, galaxies, and the universe.

Go check out the full resolution images of UDF and XDF