Ever spent the night under a sky full of stars? Clear and open above you is space, nothing to cloud your vision and keep you from distinguishing between stars and constellations. If you’ve been lucky enough to experience this, we do hope you have seen the Andromeda galaxy.
The Andromeda galaxy was named after the Ethiopian princess Andromeda, whom the Greek hero Perseus saved from a great sea monster. Perseus and Andromeda form what is probably one of the rarest love stories in the Greek mythology to have a happy ending. Just like their story, the Andromeda galaxy shines bright on a clear night sky, giving you a moment of peace and fulfillment.
In this article, we shine a spotlight on the largest picture of the Andromeda galaxy ever captured.
What is the Andromeda Galaxy?
The Andromeda galaxy is the closest major galaxy to the Milky Way. For a long time, astronomers thought of the Andromeda galaxy to be a part of the Milky Way as a nebula. In the 1920s, the astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble determined successfully that Andromeda was indeed a large galaxy with a diameter of about 200,000 light years. This galaxy finds its mention in texts as early as 965 CE from Islamic astronomer Al-Sufi. When you go for a camping trip or sit down on your countryside terrace on a clear night, you can easily starhop from the Cassiopeia constellation to find the Andromeda galaxy.
Many photographers have used similar ways to capture the Andromeda galaxy through their lenses. However, recently, a photographer broke Reddit by claiming to have captured the largest picture ever of the Andromeda galaxy. He claims that it is significant to the level of what telescopes like the Hubble space telescope, James Webb space telescope and many more have captured. Let’s talk about this single click and understand how it has become so important over the internet.
The Artist’s Perspective of Andromeda Galaxy
As a photographer, what’s better than capturing something that is still beyond human comprehension? The photographer who has captured the largest ever picture of the Andromeda galaxy shared a similar perspective on Reddit.
The tale of capturing this image started last year when the user had an idea of capturing an image that would be the best of his limits. So he thought of capturing the image of the Andromeda galaxy at an extremely high resolution. Capturing an image that completely covered the length of Andromeda is a task that requires very long exposures. The first attempt of capturing the image was a waste since the project does require great quality lenses, precision and a high editing knowledge. Over 90 hours of the exposure time went into waste with no proper image captured.
This year, after learning the gradient modeling method and coming back with a lot more experience, the user spent 159 total hours under the night sky with 25 separate panels to capture the images and three filters to get all the colors. The result of such hard work is the largest ever image captured, which is about 1.03 Gigapixels in size. This image has such high resolutions that you can even focus on the tiniest of the stars and distinguish them amongst the others.
Why is this an Amazing Feat?
The world is stunned by this capture, and not because it has the highest resolutions ever for an image of Andromeda galaxy; that title is still with telescopes like Hubble and James Webb. But the reason why this one capture has gotten such attention is that it is the largest and most clear picture of the complete length of Andromeda galaxy. The Hubble space telescope and the others have only captured high-resolution images of the Andromeda galaxy sections.
The image captured by this user is twice the size of the last world record attempt by Robert Gendler in 2008. The image contains 1,033,218,000 total pixels in the edited version, while the raw file had over a billion pixels with a file size of over 6 gigabytes. The image is truly a wonder for every person who looks at it since every little detail of the galaxy visible from the Earth is clear in this image. It was captured from SRO and is by far marvelous for human comprehension.
For those interested in space and with a fetish to learn more about the galaxies and the whole universe, images like this one are always going to blow your mind. The effort put into capturing the largest ever image of the Andromeda galaxy is truly tremendous.
Facts about the Andromeda Galaxy You Simply Must Know
Now our motive for this section is just to convert any still unobsessed human left out there into a space nerd. Here are some quick Andromeda galaxy facts that will interest you:
- Both the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy are barred spiral galaxies, characterized by a central bar-shaped structure made of stars.
- The Andromeda galaxy is also known as the Messier 31, M31, and NGC 224.
- It is part of the Local Group, which is what we call our ‘local’ assortment of galaxies.
- It was originally misnamed the Andromeda nebula.
- The Andromeda galaxy is about 765 kpc or 2.5 million light years away from us on the earth.
- The virial mass of this galaxy is of the same order of magnitude as the Milky Way, which is 1 trillion solar masses or 2.0×1042 kilograms.
- The Andromeda galaxy has a diameter of around 46.56 kpc or 152,000 light years, which makes it the largest member of the Local Group of galaxies if we judge by the extension.
- The Andromeda galaxy is seen to have a compact start cluster at its heart, pretty similar to our own galaxy.
- The Milky Way and Andromeda are expected to collide in 4 to 5 billion years from now, and they might merge to become one elliptical galaxy or a lenticular galaxy.
We hope these facts have gotten you interested in space and everything about it! Entropy’s doors remain open to sate your curiosity about more space-related factors!