Images That Capture Vastness of Space

sdifox

No Lifer
Sep 30, 2005
100,414
17,943
126
Already covered by Douglas Adams :colbert:


"The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.
To explain — since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
Trin Tragula — for that was his name — was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her.
And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion."
 
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Homerboy

Lifer
Mar 1, 2000
30,890
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These things always make my mind short-circuit.
Like... I_JUST_DONT_GET_IT
 

clamum

Lifer
Feb 13, 2003
26,256
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Wow. Most of those I knew, or didn't surprise me, but #2 sure did. You can fit all the planets, with a tiny bit of room to spare, between the Earth and Moon? Head asplodes!
 

SlitheryDee

Lifer
Feb 2, 2005
17,252
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I get a weird creepy feeling when I see the comet sitting atop LA. Those things are just flying around out there willy nilly! Somebody should do something about it!
 

TechBoyJK

Lifer
Oct 17, 2002
16,699
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Wow. Most of those I knew, or didn't surprise me, but #2 sure did. You can fit all the planets, with a tiny bit of room to spare, between the Earth and Moon? Head asplodes!

Yea, and the moon is bigger than Pluto and just slightly smaller than Mercury.

moonmerc.jpg
 

waggy

No Lifer
Dec 14, 2000
68,143
10
81
the one that always gets me is the image from the hubble telescope. they had it on a "blank" area of space. turns out that it ain't blank at all. it showed thousands of galaxies they didn't even know was in that area.

so then. we are a tiny planet in solar system. that is part of a galaxy that holds thousand and thousands of solar systems. then we find out there are thousands of galaxies in areas of space they thought were blank.

just fucking amazing.
 

tcsenter

Lifer
Sep 7, 2001
18,940
569
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But it's still like seeing the most bestest panoramic photos of the Grand Canyon v. being there.
 

edro

Lifer
Apr 5, 2002
24,326
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Here's one of my favorites for the scale of our solar system.
550px-Planets2013.jpg
Great for planet size, but bad for showing distance.
As one of the others showed, our moon is as far away as that whole pic!

The distances between things are unbelievable.
 

Ketchup

Elite Member
Sep 1, 2002
14,559
248
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That was great, thank you z1ggy.

After reading that, I can't help but be disappointed that NASA keeps getting cuts. I hope we can keep exploring.
 

Jeff7

Lifer
Jan 4, 2001
41,596
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Great for planet size, but bad for showing distance.
As one of the others showed, our moon is as far away as that whole pic!

The distances between things are unbelievable.
I like the side-scrolling website that is built to scale.



...Here it is.

I'm watching Star Trek DS9 episodes on Amazon lately. There are quite a few instances where a shuttlecraft is damaged because of an asteroid collision.
I guess the writers suck at coming up with ways to damage a shuttle and injure key characters.

Fly through our Asteroid Belt. Blindfolded.
You'll almost certainly be fine. More than half of the belt's mass is confined to roughly a dozen asteroids. The rest is tiny debris spread across a torus of immense volume. They're nothing like the dense fields seen in movies and TV.



Space is mostly empty. If you look at the Universe by volume, matter is an absurdly tiny statistical anomaly.
Though if you include the gravitational influence of matter, then the Universe is just a damn mess of it.
 

JMapleton

Diamond Member
Nov 19, 2008
4,179
2
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Picture number 4 I find the most interesting. I know it's not possible with the gravitational effects, but what if the Earth was Jupiter sized? Think of how much unexplored land there would be. Think of how vast forests and oceans would be. I think about that question a lot. Wow.
 
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effowe

Diamond Member
Nov 1, 2004
6,012
18
81
the one that always gets me is the image from the hubble telescope. they had it on a "blank" area of space. turns out that it ain't blank at all. it showed thousands of galaxies they didn't even know was in that area.

so then. we are a tiny planet in solar system. that is part of a galaxy that holds thousand and thousands of solar systems. then we find out there are thousands of galaxies in areas of space they thought were blank.

just fucking amazing.

Hubble_Ultra_Deep_Field_NICMOS.jpg


Hubble Deep Field

Thousands of galaxies in this tiny section of sky, each containing millions of stars and billions of planets. Mind blowing for sure.
 

waggy

No Lifer
Dec 14, 2000
68,143
10
81
Hubble_Ultra_Deep_Field_NICMOS.jpg


Hubble Deep Field

Thousands of galaxies in this tiny section of sky, each containing millions of stars and billions of planets. Mind blowing for sure.

that's it! also this is a area that other telescopes and such seen NOTHING. they left it on that area for like 10 days.

it's amazing for sure. they did another one that was on 1 area for longer. it picked up more then they thought it would get.
 

Jeff7

Lifer
Jan 4, 2001
41,596
20
81
Hubble_Ultra_Deep_Field_NICMOS.jpg


Hubble Deep Field

Thousands of galaxies in this tiny section of sky, each containing millions of stars and billions of planets. Mind blowing for sure.
Ah, ok, that's the NICMOS one. It's a bit different than the one I was familiar with; I guess they didn't have the IR data for the full image?

(Hubble Ultra Deep Field. ;) Hubble Deep Field was an earlier image.)


It's about 1/10 the width of the full Moon as you'd see it from the ground. Just picture that sometime when you see the Moon, and extrapolate that same density of galaxies out around the entire sky, and beneath the horizon.