I used over 24 hours of exposure of the night sky to reveal hundreds of galaxies, zoom in to see them!

Image from preview.redd.it and submitted by Idontlikecock
image showing I used over 24 hours of exposure of the night sky to reveal hundreds of galaxies, zoom in to see them!

Idontlikecock on November 10th, 2019 at 00:00 UTC »

If you feel like looking at some of my other images, learning about the targets, seeing what goes into making images like this, updates about my life, or want some lame astronomy memes, you should go check out my Instagram.

This is one of the first images created at our new southern observatory in Chile with Deep Sky West. While this setup is still in the preliminary stages of testing, we do have other setups available for public use, or free data sets you can download here.

This giant sparred spiral galaxy in the upper left is known as NGC 1365, when imaging it, the team knew there were a ton of larger galaxies within the field of view, especially over on the right side of the image. What I don't think anyone expected to see though was the hundreds of galaxies in the background. Now you might be wondering how I know there are so many. I actually ran them through a program to count all of the galaxies that have names throughout the image. In total, it counted 209 galaxies that are named! What it didn't count though are the multiple smaller ones that have no name within the catalog. Just crazy to think there are so many galaxies just as big as the main ones found in the image, but because they are so far away they just show up as faint little dots. If you are interested in seeing that annotated image yourself with gives the name and location of each galaxy in the image, you can check it out here.

Acquisition time: 27.5 hours total

Thanks for looking!

Vhodka on November 10th, 2019 at 00:57 UTC »

Images like this fascinate—and I don't know why—make me sad at the same time. Anyone else with me? You're just 'WOW' one moment and then just overwhelmed and sad both at the same time the next. Only the vastness of space makes me feel like this. It's odd.

EDIT: All your comments, you guys, make me feel even more, I don't know, I'd say smaller than I already am, but why do I feel even more alone?

redditisawesomee on November 10th, 2019 at 02:25 UTC »

Sorry for my dumb question . But can someone ELI5 how can a 24 hour exposure from a fixed point on earth result in such a photo. Won’t the earth’s rotation (and change in position) result in motion blur/shifted captured image ?