Planets, Star clusters, Nebulae, Galaxies
I saw this recommended on another thread and I've been checking it out - definitely worth it, there's some cool stuff.
http://apod.nasa.gov/
>>2596921
Thank you, here is another great collection:
http://www.rocketstem.org/2015/04/23/the-top-100-images-of-the-universe-captured-by-the-hubble-space-telescope/
fucking dank thread lads, bump for more of these fine photos
I watched a Discovery Channel documentary about telescopes a few days ago and while I knew and understood what the Hubble Deep Field (the original one, not the Ultra Deep Field done years later) was presenting, the way they showed it and explained it on that documentary was pretty fucking awe inspiring and just goes to prove how tiny and truly insignificant we hear on this one "pale blue dot" happen to be.
Hence, my contribution: the original Hubble Deep Field. The significance of this image was that before this image was created, all we could see in that tiny segment of the sky (imagine looking through a drinking straw skyward and that's how small it seemed to be) from Earth, even with our best telescopes, was just three stars that were bright enough to be discerned.
Once the Deep Field was complete, they discovered 3,000+ galaxies - not stars, entire GALAXIES - in the same view of space.
Years later when they performed the Ultra Deep Field (in a different dark patch of view) they discovered over 10,000 galaxies - again, not stars, but entire galaxies - in that viewport to the heavens.
It's just fucking incredible, it truly is. Hubble's limitation is basically about 12 billion years of view based on the speed of light because of red shift - the upcoming James Webb infrared telescope will be able to "see" further because it's designed to account for red shift specifically and the fact that it'll also be stationed a million miles away from Earth is pretty awesome too.
I hope everything works and goes off without any hitches 'cause this time out we can't just send up some astronauts to fix it.
The James Webb telescope was almost cancelled because of financial issues and delays, I really hope it gets into space by 2018
>>2599470
Galaxy's are gay
>>2599486
I recommend you commit suicide to free this galaxy of your autistic trolling
>>2601640