The Universe Thread
The thread dedicated to all things not of this planet. Feel free to post your own amazing pics or interesting links.
Below is a picture that is claimed to be the most important photograph ever taken by mankind.
The image was assembled from 342 separate exposures taken with the Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 over ten consecutive days between December 18 and December 28, 1995.
The field is so small that only a few foreground stars in the Milky Way lie within it; thus, almost all of the 3,000 objects in the image are galaxies, some of which are among the youngest and most distant known. By revealing such large numbers of very young galaxies, the HDF has become a landmark image in the study of the early universe, and it has been the source of almost 400 scientific papers since it was created.
SN 1987A was a supernova in the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy. It occurred approximately 51.4 kiloparsecs from Earth, close enough that it was visible to the naked eye.
Some perspective :
Originally Posted by Sockmonkey
