Galaxy Zoo Talk

Question about Image quality

  • HMB6EQUJ5 by HMB6EQUJ5

    I'm curious about why the images we view are so blurry compared to amazing photos of galaxies we're presented on news sites concerning recent discoveries etc etc..... Is it due to such a small segment that we are presented of a larger image?

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  • vrooje by vrooje admin, scientist

    Yes, exactly. Many of these galaxies are so distant that they're absolutely tiny on the sky, and many are also very, very faint. News sites usually show nearby and/or bright galaxies, and while they are very impressive it's important to remember that some of those news-release galaxies would be equally spectacular in these images. (Sometimes they come up for classification!)

    In some of the Hubble images we ask volunteers to classify, the galaxy is tens of billions of light-years away and the appearance of the galaxy is much smaller on the sky than the width of a human hair held at arm's length -- yet Hubble's cameras are so good that the images are many pixels across. Maybe they're not thousands of pixels across like a nearby galaxy would be, but we can still see their shapes and, from that, learn a lot about the physics of galaxy formation.

    Thanks for classifying!

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