Galaxy images after often scaled (relative brightness changed) to make features more visable.
Also non-visable wavelengths are used which pick up more details and are added as false colour. (Such as UV and Infared)
Note sure if this image is 100% accurate but is closer to reality than the other one which is always shared as is scaled and made with UV.
https://i.redd.it/ngmsh4rdn93g1.jpeg
6 Comments
Give it time – bigger too!
If my grandmother had wheels she’d look like a bike.
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I really appreciate the attention to processing details here.
This sort of assumes our eyes would have that level of resolution just because it is brighter. During a full moon we don’t have anywhere near that level of contrast and detail Andromeda is given.
To make it obvious, consider a bright summers day looking up at a high altitude cloud formation of comparable angular diameter. We know from satellite/aerial surveying photos that they have intricate detailed structure, but from Earth despite their brightness we can only see a fraction of the detail surrounded by blurred haziness.
Your reference photo is also near the horizon at sunset/sunrise. That means the light reaching your eyes has to pass through a very long stretch of warm turbulent atmosphere. Like seen in your photo, even the brightest constellations struggle to shine through and the visible stars that do twinkle their little hearts out.
If Andromeda was orders of magnitudes brighter I imagine it’d still just look like the Milky Way. A distinctly bright band of hazy light stretch over a large angular distance. Even if Andromeda was several orders of magnitude brighter than that, the massive distance means we’ll still only resolve a blurred complex shape and not that level of detail.
This image just breaks my imagination. Those vast distances between stars… and now seeing another galaxy containing billions of stars sitting there like that makes me to think that the distance between us and Andromeda is so so fucking huge, but yet, the galaxy itself is so so fucking big… it’s just incredible and mindblowing.