HiRes Hubble Picture of M101

[Gregoshi]

The European Space Agency has put together a huge hires picture of M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy composed of 51 images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The detail is stunning in this 12000 pixel by 15000 pixel image. The full size JPG file is 65mb while the original TIFF image is a whopping 450mb!! They do have smaller file sizes availabe for the faint of heart.

You can find the image here and do a little space exploration of your own: http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/html/heic0602a.html

Enjoy!

[InsaneApache]

Very nice. thnx for that.

[Crazed Rabbit]

Cool, thanks!

Crazed Rabbit

[Ianofsmeg16]

Wow! thanks, thats gone as my Desktop background now

[BDC]

I noticed this a few days ago and sent it to some physicist friends. Looks absolutely lovely.

Something like a trillion stars in that galaxy apparently. And 100 million similar to our sun...

[Marcellus]

Wow, thanks for the link. I wonder how long it will take to download the full size 196 megapixel image...

[Gregoshi]

There are some beautiful star fields in that image, especially the ones with the bright stars near the outer reaches of the galaxy. There are also quite a few nice looking background galaxies scattered throughout. I bet it took me a good 20 minutes to just casually sweep back and forth across the image to take in the whole thing.

I am curious though about the arcing bands that are blurry looking. At first I thought they might just be foreground dust/gas but they don't match up at all with the spiral arms of the galaxy. There is no explanation of them in the description of the images. The blurriness around the fringes of the image are explained as Earth-based images of M101 and its surrounding sky upon which the Hubble images where laid. But no comments on the blurry arcs.