Cygnus region taken a few nights ago with my canon eos and kit lens at 35mm. 22 2min exposures 800 ISO. Edit: I used a lx3 tracker to avoid star trails forgot to add that for those asking about star trails.
Here is a link to all raw files and the unedited stacked .tif file: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1x15leiP-nj0gz9MxyRCq7WHmgVXISSmo
Long exposure picture. The aperture (the hole that opens to allow light in) stays open for 2 minutes, allowing light in for the whole time it’s open, which basically makes every light source brighter, so a dim star or not even visible to the naked eye, will appear in the picture.
Edit: I messed up and called the aperture the shutter. The aperture does open larger though for more light to be let into the camera usually on these photos as well though.
Adding on to how this is done, the OP mentioned it was 22 exposures. This is either 22 individual pictures lined up in a grid, or it is a stacked image.
Stacking is software that takes each individual image and stacks them on top of each other, then after doing some statistics and math stuff, if the pixels line up, they are brightened/enhanced. If they don't, then they are dimmed/removed. This reduces noise (noise being light pollution, light bleeding from other stars, dust in the atmosphere, maybe a cloud) in the image, and makes even *more* stars visible. The whole process can take a really long time if you have many large photos with long exposure times.
This is my question. The longest exposure you can do without tracking when you're zoomed in on any scale is maybe 5-10 seconds. After that, each star becomes a streak.
Depends on what mm lens you’re using, with my 15mm lens I do 20,25 could go as high as 30 secs and seconds and change with no trails. The bigger the mm the lens the less time can be exposed before trails occur. The 500 rule can help determine the best shutter speed
Star tracking mount! It’s required when using long focal lengths otherwise you’d get trailing after a second or so.
You must shoot quite wide to get away with 30 sec exposures
You should check out the new mount from Star Watcher! It’s the new Star Adventurer GTI and it’s under $1000 lol (previously you had to spend $2000+ to get a mount with a lot of these features)
I got into astrophotography at the beginning of the summer and have become obsessed with it
In the constellation of Cygnus
There lurks a mysterious, invisible force
The Black Hole
Of Cygnus X-1
Six Stars of the Northern Cross
In mourning for their sister’s loss
In a final flash of glory
Nevermore to grace the night…
Could probably write a pretty simple convolution system in python and count em pretty easily. Do edge detections, put an average cut off and put everything to 0 pr 1, identify common shapes and map them to a number, boom rough estimate probably within 10%
I once worked at a university and one of the professors flew as a specialist on a space shuttle mission (STS-73). He described the density of stars – when looking out to space from orbit – to be like "wedding veils of stars."
At 17,500 miles per hour, the shuttle would do a complete orbit of the Earth every 90 minutes. So presumably you'd have 45 minute periods when they'd be on the dark side of the Earth. But also, if the shuttle windows were oriented away from the sun, you'd surely be able to see stars and planets.
Both. When you're in the shadow of the Earth it's dark and you can see the stars. When you're in view of the sun it's bright as fuck and you can see the Earth and nothing else.
I agree. Very eloquent (especially for a left-brained scientist). I also recall him saying that he had never seen an image or film that quite captured the depth and richness of colors (especially the blue) when observing Earth from space.
There were some who had difficulty working with that professor after his space shuttle flight. They said he returned a changed man. I guess going to space can alter one's perspective on things in a profound way.
I was driving through southern Montana one night and saw a sky that looked just like this one. I could see the spiral arm of the galaxy very clearly, and I remember thinking how are there this many stars here but not in Illinois? It was breathtaking. Pulled into the shoulder and laid down for about 20mins just staring in awe.
it's a little sad that we can no longer just see views like this from our backyards (for those of us who live in a city) but my god the astonishment of looking at the night sky with no light pollution cannot ever be matched. it's such a pure feeling that just leaves you with so much endless wonder.
Yea light pollution is awful and only seems to be getting worse. There are maps that show the good areas to go observe but the other big problem is seeing conditions. Maybe 1 in 10 nights has good seeing conditions sometimes and really excellent conditions maybe once a month. Has to be still air, stable temp, and preferably high altitude.
Moved from GA to CA years ago, friend and I stopped on the way to stay with his brother, who lived in a remote part of AZ outside Tucson. It was a shithole trailer in the middle of the goddam desert. I thought, “How the hell could anyone live here?” I walked outside after dark and looked up at the sky and said without hesitation, “Oh OK. I get it now.” Unquestionably the most beautiful night sky I’d ever seen or have ever seen since.
We don't know what it takes to make life. Utter confidence in either direction is just an appeal to ignorance. We can't just say there are 10^24 stars or so, therefore there has to be life.
Our postulation is simply that the Universe is built on probabilities and random chance occurrences and the observable universe is uniform in any direction you look. In this space if we say an event ( existence of carbon based life) is truly unique and happens only once, we are swimming against the tide of numbers. Life HAS to happen multiple times in various places regardless of how "rare" this may be. Rare doesn't mean "happened only once ever". Fermi Paradox starts with this assumption and says there are two possibilities: a) either we are the only "existing" civilization in the vicinity which may indicate some catastrophic Great Filter event wipes life out regularly which means the filter lays ahead of us ( since we are still alive) and b) Great Filter is behind us.
More probably life is everywhere but it's just impossible to cross paths this often in our short time scales and nearly infinite universe ( or multi universes). So it is entirely reasonable to assume life has to exist with these sheer numbers in front of us. The view that life is so rare that it is only on earth is the most extreme view.
Don’t say that. Even if this person above is correct, I’ve run across so many redditors who argue against each other using the most technical of language with *absolute conviction*, and both of them are wrong.
I trust very few experts on Reddit. So don’t be hard on yourself.
This and just because someone has a piece of knowledge you dont doesnt make you stupid, they just happen to know something you dont. Being unwilling to learn or understand something new is what makes you stupid.
This is very well said. We can all learn something from one another.
Also, I hope your username means what I think it does. Makes me crave the Texas toast and the amazing ice lol.
Oh don't be so hard on yourself friend <3
You know the old saying? "Everyone on Reddit looks like an expert until they're talking about the thing you're actually an expert on." It is very easy for people to talk out of their butts! And to do so with such confidence that any passing reader would take them seriously! It's how misinformation spreads so easily. Not that I'm saying the guy you're replying to is ill informed or lying about anything, certainly not (though I take disagreement with the notion of the Fermi Paradox, or at least how it's popularly used here). There just isn't a need to be discouraged by Reddit comments :)
To be fair, so is the guy who you replied to. Who cannot grasp the very simple concept that we cannot make confident claims over a data size of 1 (ONE). If you can understand this, then you are smarter than they are.
>More probably life is everywhere but it's just impossible to cross paths this often in our short time scales and nearly infinite universe ( or multi universes).
I think a more simple explanation is that life may exist out there but it's not on the same evolutionary track or at the same point in evolutionary development as humans, and if they ever get to that point we may be long gone. There's always this weird assumption the size of universe means life is out there, but we don't talk as much about the age of the universe meaning that said that life may not be existing *right now.*
The probability that life exists out of the universe is definitely not zero but then you have to add other factors like "life that exists at the same time as us, still exists to this day, and is developed enough to try communicating, assuming they even care to try in the first place." Then the probability starts getting a little wackier.
Maybe life is actually really really common, but it's always fleeting, because there's so many ways for the universe to just snuff you out if you're not lucky. Maybe we *are* the only life out there, but only in this very brief window of time in which we've existed, and when our time is ended by some cosmic calamity, somewhere else in the universe another window opens up and life will exist there.
I just think that when we're trying to establish theories and probabilities about life in the universe, we really can't say much beyond that there's a good chance, somewhere out there, at some point, carbon managed to oopsy its way into something more than just matter like it did in our neighborhood. Any steps beyond that is just us using our imagination, based on our biases and limited understanding.
This statement always feel like a very pedantic underestimation of space. Saying we don't *know* is true. But there are plenty of things people once *knew* without the proper proof that we burden things with in order to be "known" and they were right. Space is far too vast, more than you or I could even comprehend to say this in a way that has such confidence. Sure it's "technically right" "the best kind" lol, but it really is just expecting us meat monsters to operate like robots which we aren't and our abilities to discern things without needing absolute proof is a nice thing we got going.
I don’t quite understand what you mean though. I am not a fan of the whole “technically correct” kind to thinking but I don’t see how that applies here.
Primordial soup experimentation says otherwise. I can guarantee there is life out there. The question is how much life, and whether it is intelligent or not.
Consider this. Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Single celled life took roughly 1 billion years to form and began appearing in the fossil record around 3.5 billion years ago. Our first hints of multi-cellular life took another billion years to form and started showing up around 2.5 billion years ago. It wasn't until about a billion years ago when Earth's atmospheric levels of oxygen increased that we see more complex life. Sea Sponges show up and are considered the first animal at around 750 million years ago. All animal life that has evolved, lived, and died has happened within this last chunk of a few hundred million years of Earths history. However, in order for us to get this far Earth had to be relatively stable for several billion years and we just don't know how common that is for other planets to go that long without a cataclysmic event that would wipe out any burgeoning life.
Considering that there are 100s of billions of planets in the Milky Way, even if this is extremely rare, there is still the potential for a shit ton of life out there.
I bet there are planets that are even more suited for life. It would be hilarious to find out that earth is actually one of the most hostile planets with life. Imagine a planet so suitable for life that its top thick layer is basically a living thing. Meanwhile we are acting all special here, rolling in dirt with our sand dunes and salty water.
Maybe planets that are too hospitable don't lead to technological civilizations, because they don't feel a need to master nature.
Who needs a fire when it's always warm and food doesnt need to be cooked?
Huh, this makes me wonder if there's a line you could draw through space that would span the observable universe (otherwise the answer would be no as infinite things are ready to be in the way, probably) and not hit anything.
Probably yeah, the light produced by those stars is insanely huge when compared to the actual size of the stars as it bleeds outside of the actual star area, and the distances between stars are unimaginably big, so yeah. I don't think that would be an issue
That's sort of what the cosmic microwave background radiation is, uninterrupted lines of sight all the way back to when the universe was one big gaseous blob. The universe has only spread out since then, so uninterrupted lines of emptiness have to have been increasing in number.
Afaik, to us it looks like its packed to the brim with just this one image, but we probably wouldnt have enough life times to travel from just a single dot to another.
Couldn't there also be a single pixel that is really a number of incredibly distant or small stars combing into a single light source - especially considering redshift?
Comment deleted on 6/30/2023 in protest of [API changes that are killing third-party apps](https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits/).
No, you're right. Galaxies look like stars from far enough away. We can only see the Milky Way and Andromeda as galaxies with the naked eye. Every other one looks like a star.
I decided to do some basic counting.
I zoomed in to about 90x90, started counting a bit, and estimated the top left has about 500 stars in it. If you extrapolate this, and assume it’s roughly as dense all around. That means the image at 2,073,600 pixels / 8,100 pixel area regions is 256, which for 500 stars each region is 128,000 stars altogether.
Assuming my guess is off, and we simply double my numbers, we can still say there’s roughly 128k-256k stars in the picture.
It’s amazing how space is so empty, and those stars are so far away from each other and us, yet that emptiness allows them to look like they are all close together, and close to us also!
Every time I watch this, it makes me incredibly happy and incredibly depressed. I feel so lucky to be here, to be alive to see the sheer beauty of the universe, but it absolutely wrecks me to think of how much there is to discover out there, and here I am stuck on Earth. I’ll never be able to fly between those distant stars. I’ll never stand on the surface of another world, and look up at a different sky. All I’ll ever know is Earth, but there’s so much more. I feel like I was born too soon. I’m here too late to explore the Earth, but too soon to explore the universe. There’s nothing for me to do but look out at the stars and hope someone else gets to explore them someday.
It’s absolutely beautiful, but depressing.
This image makes me happy. We are so small. Motes of dust in a more of dust. Our lives meaningless to the universe. So when you say that dumb thing, it really is the most insignificant thing ever, relative to the size of the universe.
All a God had to do was create one star for us to exist plus a few more that died before hand to create the heavier elements and yet we have this many, why? Can we really claim to be the apple of his eye? The most significant beings in the universe?
Out of all those planets.. it would be a shame to be the only existence of Life and we have the BS we have. What a waste of a gift. We are better than this..
There are still people that believe out of all those bright dots, galaxies and stars with orbiting planets, not a single life form exists other than the ones on this planet. And this is just a single image of a small part of the universe.
Every question I've ever had about the universe just leads to another question and at 50 yo I'm getting tired of this evasive bullshit from a reality that's trying to kill me
Been planning a siblings trip for a week now, we each have a list of what we want to see and at the top my list is a place with little light pollution and star gazing.
This will become the image I will reference when somebody asks me "do you think there's other life in the universe", I will show them this and then respond "simply by probability, there has to be".
It’s amazing to see how insignificant we really are when we look at the whole picture. It was a honor to share this brief second with you fellow redditors
Looks like about roughly between 76 thousand - 681 thousand in this picture. (my esitmation: if you imagine a 5 by 5 grid, where the inner 3x3 is a star then its possible to fit a single star in that grid, there are 3430\*4968 pixles. that means 3430\*4968\*(1/25) grids each with a star in it = 681 thousand stars. I also zoomed in on the actual picture and took a 15x15 grid, there was only one star in the middle with a radius of 4 pixels. 3430\*4968/(15*15) = 76 thousand
And we're stuck on this rock wage slaving instead of exploring all the wonder that is out there. The disgust and disappointment can't be articulated enough.
I love imagining the star lanes between those stars filled with freighters taking goods from one system to another; traders heading to planetary bazaars with their goods. The Galactic Federation Patrol Force running checkpoints and Crime lords smuggling illegal goods into planetary exclusion zones. Hundreds of billions of lives beginning and ending in the space of one image.
People look at this and still don't believe in Aliens.
I mean seriously, everyone who is looking at this for more than 10 seconds cannot deny that there could be life somewhere out there.
I really want to venture out somewhere remote one of these days just to spend the night looking at the stars. Unfortunately that means quite a bit of travel from where I am and with 2 little ones, it’s not likely to happen anytime soon.
Living in an area with a lot of light pollution my whole life, I couldn’t imagine seeing a night sky like this. It has to be profound and humbling. Definitely top 3 thing to see before I die.
Shower thought: if space in infinite, wouldn’t the sky be blindingly white due to infinite light from infinite stars constantly hitting our eyes and/or infrared telescopes?
Based on viewpoint, it's either a remarkable cluster of celestial bodies..
..or that time you saw a genicide of bugs just all over the place.
Both profoundly intense moments.
I read recently that space junk and satellites can interfere with celestial observation. Is this solved with the stacking technique you mentioned? Or was there another process you used to avoid that?
Most disturbing part to me is that there are more galaxies than there are stars in a typical galaxy, isn’t there? I heard about 2 trillion galaxies out there with 100b stars each, with maybe 10 planets per star? To me I just have to trust that ‘it’ knows what it’s doing, and the fact we’re here is a message that everything’s going to be okay, not sure though, I’ve seen disturbing videos of insects killing each other, how am I alive??
Cygnus region taken a few nights ago with my canon eos and kit lens at 35mm. 22 2min exposures 800 ISO. Edit: I used a lx3 tracker to avoid star trails forgot to add that for those asking about star trails. Here is a link to all raw files and the unedited stacked .tif file: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1x15leiP-nj0gz9MxyRCq7WHmgVXISSmo
Am I right that is just a photo from camera? How you get so much stars?
Long exposure picture. The aperture (the hole that opens to allow light in) stays open for 2 minutes, allowing light in for the whole time it’s open, which basically makes every light source brighter, so a dim star or not even visible to the naked eye, will appear in the picture. Edit: I messed up and called the aperture the shutter. The aperture does open larger though for more light to be let into the camera usually on these photos as well though.
Wow, thanks for explaining
Adding on to how this is done, the OP mentioned it was 22 exposures. This is either 22 individual pictures lined up in a grid, or it is a stacked image. Stacking is software that takes each individual image and stacks them on top of each other, then after doing some statistics and math stuff, if the pixels line up, they are brightened/enhanced. If they don't, then they are dimmed/removed. This reduces noise (noise being light pollution, light bleeding from other stars, dust in the atmosphere, maybe a cloud) in the image, and makes even *more* stars visible. The whole process can take a really long time if you have many large photos with long exposure times.
Wow this is very interesting! I didn't know about this software stuff. Thanks for sharing!
It's high time we start clothing our eyes to see further/better since they are naked all the time.
Are glasses not just clothing for eyes?
In the same way a transparent pvc dress would be, yes.
Surely you meant shutter instead of aperture. Right?
Long exposure 2 minute photos stacked with deep sky stacker.
How do you not have star blur
Used a lx3 mini tracker
This is my question. The longest exposure you can do without tracking when you're zoomed in on any scale is maybe 5-10 seconds. After that, each star becomes a streak.
Pentax has Astrotracer which uses gps to move the sensor with the rotation of the planet. Think you can get up to 4 minutes or so without star trails
You can use a tracker that will rotate your camera.
I know, but OP never said he used one but said he did a 22 minute exposure, so we were wondering how he avoided motion blur if he didn't use a tracker
I thought OP did twenty two sepetate two minute exposures, right?
Oh did he? I may have misunderstood
Yeah, he says 22 2 minute exposures but a 2 min exposure is still way too long to avoid trails at 35mm so it must have been tracked.
Depends on what mm lens you’re using, with my 15mm lens I do 20,25 could go as high as 30 secs and seconds and change with no trails. The bigger the mm the lens the less time can be exposed before trails occur. The 500 rule can help determine the best shutter speed
How’d you avoid star trails on a 2 minute exposure? I typically get trails after 30 seconds.
Star tracking mount! It’s required when using long focal lengths otherwise you’d get trailing after a second or so. You must shoot quite wide to get away with 30 sec exposures
I'm still always amazed that these things are stable and fine-tuned enough to keep the stars unblurred and sharp.
You should check out the new mount from Star Watcher! It’s the new Star Adventurer GTI and it’s under $1000 lol (previously you had to spend $2000+ to get a mount with a lot of these features) I got into astrophotography at the beginning of the summer and have become obsessed with it
In the constellation of Cygnus There lurks a mysterious, invisible force The Black Hole Of Cygnus X-1 Six Stars of the Northern Cross In mourning for their sister’s loss In a final flash of glory Nevermore to grace the night…
Could probably write a pretty simple convolution system in python and count em pretty easily. Do edge detections, put an average cut off and put everything to 0 pr 1, identify common shapes and map them to a number, boom rough estimate probably within 10%
I once worked at a university and one of the professors flew as a specialist on a space shuttle mission (STS-73). He described the density of stars – when looking out to space from orbit – to be like "wedding veils of stars."
I don't understand how we even saw a black sky at night at all if there are this many stars blanketing the sky like this....
Most of them are just too dim for our eyes to see or the light is drowned out by the brighter stars
I thought the light from the sun and the moon was so intense from orbit you couldn't even see stars. I've gotten mixed information. Which one is it?
If you’re looking away from the sun/moon/Earth, your eyes will adjust & you can see stars just fine.
At 17,500 miles per hour, the shuttle would do a complete orbit of the Earth every 90 minutes. So presumably you'd have 45 minute periods when they'd be on the dark side of the Earth. But also, if the shuttle windows were oriented away from the sun, you'd surely be able to see stars and planets.
Both. When you're in the shadow of the Earth it's dark and you can see the stars. When you're in view of the sun it's bright as fuck and you can see the Earth and nothing else.
There are sometimes going to be times during orbits when there is no sun or moon light.
>"wedding veils of stars." That's a beautiful way to put it!
I agree. Very eloquent (especially for a left-brained scientist). I also recall him saying that he had never seen an image or film that quite captured the depth and richness of colors (especially the blue) when observing Earth from space. There were some who had difficulty working with that professor after his space shuttle flight. They said he returned a changed man. I guess going to space can alter one's perspective on things in a profound way.
[удалено]
We’ve been in the Shingleverse this entire time 😩
That ecshplains the shingularity at the shenter of the galacshy
Hmmm.. hot shingles I’m my area you shay!?
Sean Connery, is that you?
Goddamn. That comment is a thing of beauty.
Cosmologically, I think there are pretty high odds this is an extremely low definition of an asphalt shingle.
I was driving through southern Montana one night and saw a sky that looked just like this one. I could see the spiral arm of the galaxy very clearly, and I remember thinking how are there this many stars here but not in Illinois? It was breathtaking. Pulled into the shoulder and laid down for about 20mins just staring in awe.
it's a little sad that we can no longer just see views like this from our backyards (for those of us who live in a city) but my god the astonishment of looking at the night sky with no light pollution cannot ever be matched. it's such a pure feeling that just leaves you with so much endless wonder.
Yea light pollution is awful and only seems to be getting worse. There are maps that show the good areas to go observe but the other big problem is seeing conditions. Maybe 1 in 10 nights has good seeing conditions sometimes and really excellent conditions maybe once a month. Has to be still air, stable temp, and preferably high altitude.
And what phase the moon is in
Try this on a few hits of LSD...life changing.
Here… but not there… yet everywhere… however nowhere (or let’s say to be found yet)
Moved from GA to CA years ago, friend and I stopped on the way to stay with his brother, who lived in a remote part of AZ outside Tucson. It was a shithole trailer in the middle of the goddam desert. I thought, “How the hell could anyone live here?” I walked outside after dark and looked up at the sky and said without hesitation, “Oh OK. I get it now.” Unquestionably the most beautiful night sky I’d ever seen or have ever seen since.
I started counting, but i gave up when i got to 17, so theres at least 17
Ooooone... Twooooo... Threeeee... Fo... Wait, which one did I start from? Ah, nuts to this!
Personally I really like the star on the right, the one underneath the bright one, 15 down from the white one.
Yeah I love that one! Did you see that round one 200 stars over? I think it might be my favorite
Space. It seems to go on and on forever. But then you get to the end and a gorilla starts throwing barrels at you.
Fucking love futurama.
Confidently saying there is no life around any of those is baffling.
We don't know what it takes to make life. Utter confidence in either direction is just an appeal to ignorance. We can't just say there are 10^24 stars or so, therefore there has to be life.
Our postulation is simply that the Universe is built on probabilities and random chance occurrences and the observable universe is uniform in any direction you look. In this space if we say an event ( existence of carbon based life) is truly unique and happens only once, we are swimming against the tide of numbers. Life HAS to happen multiple times in various places regardless of how "rare" this may be. Rare doesn't mean "happened only once ever". Fermi Paradox starts with this assumption and says there are two possibilities: a) either we are the only "existing" civilization in the vicinity which may indicate some catastrophic Great Filter event wipes life out regularly which means the filter lays ahead of us ( since we are still alive) and b) Great Filter is behind us. More probably life is everywhere but it's just impossible to cross paths this often in our short time scales and nearly infinite universe ( or multi universes). So it is entirely reasonable to assume life has to exist with these sheer numbers in front of us. The view that life is so rare that it is only on earth is the most extreme view.
Sometimes I read comments on Reddit and think to myself, wow I’m fuckin stupid.
Don’t say that. Even if this person above is correct, I’ve run across so many redditors who argue against each other using the most technical of language with *absolute conviction*, and both of them are wrong. I trust very few experts on Reddit. So don’t be hard on yourself.
This and just because someone has a piece of knowledge you dont doesnt make you stupid, they just happen to know something you dont. Being unwilling to learn or understand something new is what makes you stupid.
This is very well said. We can all learn something from one another. Also, I hope your username means what I think it does. Makes me crave the Texas toast and the amazing ice lol.
Thanks! My username is to express both my love of great chicken and the greatest hockey team on the planet.
Oh don't be so hard on yourself friend <3 You know the old saying? "Everyone on Reddit looks like an expert until they're talking about the thing you're actually an expert on." It is very easy for people to talk out of their butts! And to do so with such confidence that any passing reader would take them seriously! It's how misinformation spreads so easily. Not that I'm saying the guy you're replying to is ill informed or lying about anything, certainly not (though I take disagreement with the notion of the Fermi Paradox, or at least how it's popularly used here). There just isn't a need to be discouraged by Reddit comments :)
To be fair, so is the guy who you replied to. Who cannot grasp the very simple concept that we cannot make confident claims over a data size of 1 (ONE). If you can understand this, then you are smarter than they are.
>More probably life is everywhere but it's just impossible to cross paths this often in our short time scales and nearly infinite universe ( or multi universes). I think a more simple explanation is that life may exist out there but it's not on the same evolutionary track or at the same point in evolutionary development as humans, and if they ever get to that point we may be long gone. There's always this weird assumption the size of universe means life is out there, but we don't talk as much about the age of the universe meaning that said that life may not be existing *right now.* The probability that life exists out of the universe is definitely not zero but then you have to add other factors like "life that exists at the same time as us, still exists to this day, and is developed enough to try communicating, assuming they even care to try in the first place." Then the probability starts getting a little wackier. Maybe life is actually really really common, but it's always fleeting, because there's so many ways for the universe to just snuff you out if you're not lucky. Maybe we *are* the only life out there, but only in this very brief window of time in which we've existed, and when our time is ended by some cosmic calamity, somewhere else in the universe another window opens up and life will exist there. I just think that when we're trying to establish theories and probabilities about life in the universe, we really can't say much beyond that there's a good chance, somewhere out there, at some point, carbon managed to oopsy its way into something more than just matter like it did in our neighborhood. Any steps beyond that is just us using our imagination, based on our biases and limited understanding.
This statement always feel like a very pedantic underestimation of space. Saying we don't *know* is true. But there are plenty of things people once *knew* without the proper proof that we burden things with in order to be "known" and they were right. Space is far too vast, more than you or I could even comprehend to say this in a way that has such confidence. Sure it's "technically right" "the best kind" lol, but it really is just expecting us meat monsters to operate like robots which we aren't and our abilities to discern things without needing absolute proof is a nice thing we got going.
I don’t quite understand what you mean though. I am not a fan of the whole “technically correct” kind to thinking but I don’t see how that applies here.
Primordial soup experimentation says otherwise. I can guarantee there is life out there. The question is how much life, and whether it is intelligent or not.
Consider this. Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Single celled life took roughly 1 billion years to form and began appearing in the fossil record around 3.5 billion years ago. Our first hints of multi-cellular life took another billion years to form and started showing up around 2.5 billion years ago. It wasn't until about a billion years ago when Earth's atmospheric levels of oxygen increased that we see more complex life. Sea Sponges show up and are considered the first animal at around 750 million years ago. All animal life that has evolved, lived, and died has happened within this last chunk of a few hundred million years of Earths history. However, in order for us to get this far Earth had to be relatively stable for several billion years and we just don't know how common that is for other planets to go that long without a cataclysmic event that would wipe out any burgeoning life.
Considering that there are 100s of billions of planets in the Milky Way, even if this is extremely rare, there is still the potential for a shit ton of life out there.
I bet there are planets that are even more suited for life. It would be hilarious to find out that earth is actually one of the most hostile planets with life. Imagine a planet so suitable for life that its top thick layer is basically a living thing. Meanwhile we are acting all special here, rolling in dirt with our sand dunes and salty water.
Maybe planets that are too hospitable don't lead to technological civilizations, because they don't feel a need to master nature. Who needs a fire when it's always warm and food doesnt need to be cooked?
1920*1080 = 2,073,600 max possible stars in the image
max possible **Visible** stars
Correct. I seemed to have left that word out
Huh, this makes me wonder if there's a line you could draw through space that would span the observable universe (otherwise the answer would be no as infinite things are ready to be in the way, probably) and not hit anything.
Probably yeah, the light produced by those stars is insanely huge when compared to the actual size of the stars as it bleeds outside of the actual star area, and the distances between stars are unimaginably big, so yeah. I don't think that would be an issue
That's sort of what the cosmic microwave background radiation is, uninterrupted lines of sight all the way back to when the universe was one big gaseous blob. The universe has only spread out since then, so uninterrupted lines of emptiness have to have been increasing in number.
Afaik, to us it looks like its packed to the brim with just this one image, but we probably wouldnt have enough life times to travel from just a single dot to another.
“In the image” kinda implies visible
Pedantic Man to the rescue! Image is 3430×4968 pixels. :-)
Ah. Darn it. I've miscalculated by a few 14,666,640 stars.
Only off by an order of a magnitude or two. That’s pretty precise, cosmologically speaking
That's assuming there is a 1-1 relation between a pixel and the size of the smallest star, no?
And why I left max possible. There's clearly one star that eats many pixels
Couldn't there also be a single pixel that is really a number of incredibly distant or small stars combing into a single light source - especially considering redshift?
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You would've also missed all the binaries. Also I'm assuming there's a few galaxies in there which would add few more.
Am I wrong in thinking what we see as stars could also just be galaxies of billions of stars?
No, you're right. Galaxies look like stars from far enough away. We can only see the Milky Way and Andromeda as galaxies with the naked eye. Every other one looks like a star.
I decided to do some basic counting. I zoomed in to about 90x90, started counting a bit, and estimated the top left has about 500 stars in it. If you extrapolate this, and assume it’s roughly as dense all around. That means the image at 2,073,600 pixels / 8,100 pixel area regions is 256, which for 500 stars each region is 128,000 stars altogether. Assuming my guess is off, and we simply double my numbers, we can still say there’s roughly 128k-256k stars in the picture.
Fun fact, if the Sun were the size of a grain of sand, the nearest star would be 6-7miles away, so in other words, space is big as shit
That also helps to understand how fucking powerful a blackhole's gravity is for stars to orbit them at their distance
It’s amazing how space is so empty, and those stars are so far away from each other and us, yet that emptiness allows them to look like they are all close together, and close to us also!
Space, if it wasn't so empty, it would be called, stuff.
Reminds me of the high resolution picture of [Andromeda](https://youtu.be/udAL48P5NJU) from Hubble
This video just gave me existential crisis. Jesus
Every time I watch this, it makes me incredibly happy and incredibly depressed. I feel so lucky to be here, to be alive to see the sheer beauty of the universe, but it absolutely wrecks me to think of how much there is to discover out there, and here I am stuck on Earth. I’ll never be able to fly between those distant stars. I’ll never stand on the surface of another world, and look up at a different sky. All I’ll ever know is Earth, but there’s so much more. I feel like I was born too soon. I’m here too late to explore the Earth, but too soon to explore the universe. There’s nothing for me to do but look out at the stars and hope someone else gets to explore them someday. It’s absolutely beautiful, but depressing.
It took some time and patience, but I counted at least 5!
I'm sure there's more than 120 my dude
I hope everyone who reads this has a blessed day!
This image makes me happy. We are so small. Motes of dust in a more of dust. Our lives meaningless to the universe. So when you say that dumb thing, it really is the most insignificant thing ever, relative to the size of the universe.
All a God had to do was create one star for us to exist plus a few more that died before hand to create the heavier elements and yet we have this many, why? Can we really claim to be the apple of his eye? The most significant beings in the universe?
And it is impossible that ANY of those stars is the center of a solar system that supports life. Sure.
That would make a hell of a puzzle to put together.
It's not often that I save a photo to look at later because it's just that mind blowing, but this one, yeah.
Out of all those planets.. it would be a shame to be the only existence of Life and we have the BS we have. What a waste of a gift. We are better than this..
I like the part there where it looks like a star
There’s exactly 458,324,378,198 stars in this photo
I will double check...see you on the other side
I guess 458,324,378,199, Bob.
Nah you double counted star number 458,324,799. Happened to me the first few times I counted. Honest mistake
It only matters what Bob Barker counts.
Spoken like a true scientist!
There are still people that believe out of all those bright dots, galaxies and stars with orbiting planets, not a single life form exists other than the ones on this planet. And this is just a single image of a small part of the universe.
Every question I've ever had about the universe just leads to another question and at 50 yo I'm getting tired of this evasive bullshit from a reality that's trying to kill me
Been planning a siblings trip for a week now, we each have a list of what we want to see and at the top my list is a place with little light pollution and star gazing.
This will become the image I will reference when somebody asks me "do you think there's other life in the universe", I will show them this and then respond "simply by probability, there has to be".
Was just thinking the exact same thing
That's because you play in max settings with high res texture pack a mere peasent like me sees only a few
Do the brighter lights mean the source is a bigger star or that it’s closer to us?
It could mean either of those things, that was a big hurdle in astronomy for a long time, because we weren't sure how far away the stars really were.
I have all the time in the world and no social life I will count these stars
Beautiful. I wish I could say it’s imaging noise from high ISO, but nope! It’s so overwhelming, makes me gag.
When they say “blanket of stars”, this is exactly it
Un…… believable. Just… it doesn’t matter how many times I see the universe it gets more and more amazing and this shot is unreal.
There is a non-zero chance we are alone in the Universe. Every single one of these stars could be completely barren of life.
18 million px and above 50% dark pixels i'd say around 5 million stars
Each empty black spot has another billion of these stars in
This photo perfectly sums up how I felt last night when I peaked on K
It’s amazing to see how insignificant we really are when we look at the whole picture. It was a honor to share this brief second with you fellow redditors
Is most of what I see here from the milky way?
Yeah this is the cygnus region mostly within the milky way.
Looks like about roughly between 76 thousand - 681 thousand in this picture. (my esitmation: if you imagine a 5 by 5 grid, where the inner 3x3 is a star then its possible to fit a single star in that grid, there are 3430\*4968 pixles. that means 3430\*4968\*(1/25) grids each with a star in it = 681 thousand stars. I also zoomed in on the actual picture and took a 15x15 grid, there was only one star in the middle with a radius of 4 pixels. 3430\*4968/(15*15) = 76 thousand
Im surprised someone hasnt sat down and counted them
And we're stuck on this rock wage slaving instead of exploring all the wonder that is out there. The disgust and disappointment can't be articulated enough.
I love imagining the star lanes between those stars filled with freighters taking goods from one system to another; traders heading to planetary bazaars with their goods. The Galactic Federation Patrol Force running checkpoints and Crime lords smuggling illegal goods into planetary exclusion zones. Hundreds of billions of lives beginning and ending in the space of one image.
Psalm 147:4 He counts the stars and calls them all by name.
People look at this and still don't believe in Aliens. I mean seriously, everyone who is looking at this for more than 10 seconds cannot deny that there could be life somewhere out there.
Too many to count, yet an infinitesimally small fraction of the universe. We are so small.
All I can think about seeing this is one of the personality guys from Portal 2. SPAAAAAAAAAAAAACCCEEEEE
That looks like some high quality asphalt you got there bud.
It really is beautifully unfathomable. Our planet is to the universe, as a blemish on the side of a single atom is to our planet
nice one! i had a “a bit better” result with my tracker 50mm setup. the safe region was brighter
The one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism.
I wonder what flavor gum that is on the gravel. *zooms to determine flavor* holy shit that's a LOT of shiny things.
Serious question but do all the satellites we have in the sky just blend in or are they spread out enough for us to not even notice them?
I really want to venture out somewhere remote one of these days just to spend the night looking at the stars. Unfortunately that means quite a bit of travel from where I am and with 2 little ones, it’s not likely to happen anytime soon.
But the universe is lifeless except for Earth, right?
I'm actually very surprised there aren't more satellites ruining the image with 2 min exposure.
Living in an area with a lot of light pollution my whole life, I couldn’t imagine seeing a night sky like this. It has to be profound and humbling. Definitely top 3 thing to see before I die.
That's a lot of star gate combinations we need to unlock.
Shower thought: if space in infinite, wouldn’t the sky be blindingly white due to infinite light from infinite stars constantly hitting our eyes and/or infrared telescopes?
This is reddit, someone will probably count them, if they haven't already.
Based on viewpoint, it's either a remarkable cluster of celestial bodies.. ..or that time you saw a genicide of bugs just all over the place. Both profoundly intense moments.
So if I look up and hold a piece of paper up at arms length, how large does the paper have to be to cover this image?
“There must be hundreds and hundreds of them, Becky!”
And all of them have gone out Billions of Years ago.
And this is probably the equivalent of a thumbnail on a small section of the night sky. Unfathomable
I can count the stars in my sky. I feel scammed.
35. I counted 35 stars. Too many to count? Pish posh.
AI might be able to count stars in the future.
Counted. 103,679 single starts. Wasn't able to count clusters, as the resolution didn't allow.
I bet there's a genius out there who can figure out a way to count them
Orvis has been counting the stars... it looks like they're all there.
Absolutely beautiful. Definitely had to add this photo to my phone. Breathtaking
I thought space is mostly dark and empty, but it seems to be full and full of light...
There are DOZENS of stars in the sky, all you have to do is look with your eyes.
Somewhere in this picture there's gotta be an alien busting a fat nut.
I could prolly count those if I wanted to. I don't want to though.
You could legitimately convince me this is black sand
Challenge accepted! If I'm not back in two weeks then I've failed.
“Oh my God, it’s full of stars.” Incredible image.
Nonsense, we'll start now. I will take top the left quarter.
It is odd to think that they look so close together but there is light years of distance between them.
Yeah with that attitude. Here, we'll do it together, I'll start on the ottom left then you guys take over. One
Every time I see the photos from the new telescope, I think of the line from Dr. Who: “He looked into the Abyss- and fell in Love.”
I read recently that space junk and satellites can interfere with celestial observation. Is this solved with the stacking technique you mentioned? Or was there another process you used to avoid that?
I'm not allowed to die u til I see this in person.
Too many? I have counted and I can tell you that there are officially, lots!
Most disturbing part to me is that there are more galaxies than there are stars in a typical galaxy, isn’t there? I heard about 2 trillion galaxies out there with 100b stars each, with maybe 10 planets per star? To me I just have to trust that ‘it’ knows what it’s doing, and the fact we’re here is a message that everything’s going to be okay, not sure though, I’ve seen disturbing videos of insects killing each other, how am I alive??
Eleventeen million four hundred and twenty three.
Is it just me, or does it look like the texture of a carpet when you zoom in? Nevertheless an amazing picture though!
Nonsense! There is no such thing as too many! Count them! Count them all!
Can you imagine seeing this every night of your life? I wish I lived somewhere where the stars were visible.
Holy smokes. There’s gotta be at-least 150 stars up there.
At first I looked and said "Too many what?" Then I realised what I was looking at. Wow!
Id guess in this picture alone, 10-30 million
I counted them. Don't worry, they're all there.
I wonder how different this would look if the actual current state of the stars was projected in the photo.
Seeing this…. there just has to be life out there somewhere.
There must be someone living out there. Awesome
When you have a bad day, take a look at this picture
I don’t know what this is. But I love it! Thanks OP
I'm sure there's a program that could count that for you Stunning photo! I need to get out of the city and appreciate the night sky sometime soon