Dramatic photographs
There are many dramatic and beautiful photographs on the Web. But for me, just about the most dramatic and meaningful, and one of the more beautifuyl, is the Hubble Deep Field: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1998/41/image/b/format/large_web/ .This is the second such picture, taken in 1998. Essentially, for 10 days, the Hubble telescope pointed at an apparenty completely featureless tiny corner of the sky. And this is what it saw. Galaxies. Lots of Galaxies. And every single one of those galaxies contains literally billions of stars. Many contain, as does our own, of the order of a hundred billion stars.
It really puts me in my place.
Given the sensitivity of the Hubble, I wonder how many photons it took to build the image of each of those Galaxies. At a guess, of the same order as the number of stars in those galaxies - a hunderd billion or so. Which means that of all the gazillions of photons put out by all the stars in those galaxies during the ten day window of opportunity, around one made it to where we could see it.
Which, on the other side, puts the Hubble in its place, as a fantastic human achievement, to detect such faint objects. We should all be proud of it - and Americans, who actually paid for it, the more so.
It really puts me in my place.
Given the sensitivity of the Hubble, I wonder how many photons it took to build the image of each of those Galaxies. At a guess, of the same order as the number of stars in those galaxies - a hunderd billion or so. Which means that of all the gazillions of photons put out by all the stars in those galaxies during the ten day window of opportunity, around one made it to where we could see it.
Which, on the other side, puts the Hubble in its place, as a fantastic human achievement, to detect such faint objects. We should all be proud of it - and Americans, who actually paid for it, the more so.