Scale

Hello again

I like space so it's not surprising that a large percentage of my occasional posts here are space related. Anyway, today I was playing with an full size (.tiff) image taken from a space telescope, it's over 650mb big and took about 10 minutes for me to open it in CS4.

My post today isn't about the wonder that is space telescopes or the whole of this image:

...It's about the very top image. It may not look much but it's actually a picture taken from the right of the galaxy above. As you can see there are a lot of stars, a damn lot in fact. Whats you wont know is that the picture is only 0.2% of the entire 2D galaxy shown above. The part I choose for this example wasn't a particularly dense patch as well. To aid with understanding it, each of those dots in the top image is a star, they seem pretty close as well when in fact they are light years apart. We would look that close to our neighbouring stars from the perspective of viewers from that galaxy.

I hope the outer spiral of that galaxy gets more action than the arm of the milky way we find ourselves on.