Last edited Thu Mar 12, 2015, 12:58 PM - Edit history (1)

Y'know, back when we made stuff in this country.

back in the days when color TVs were considered a luxury.

Almost any $15 kid's toy digital camera today does better than the high-end $10,000 plus video equipment of that era.

My first college major was television and electronic engineering. (I later switched to biology.) The "miracle" device in our college television studio, the toy everyone wanted to play with, was a time base corrector with enough memory to store a few frames so that even the crappiest video source could be gen-locked and upgraded to broadcast quality.

Many years later that's the sort of equipment that made "America's Funniest Home Videos" possible.

Before that, in the era of the television pictured above, the only way to do that was to take a higher quality video using a studio camera pointed at an expensive high end monitor with specialized "slow" phosphors and electronics, which would give the video a sort of swishy ghostly look, or just as complicated, a Kinescope. When PBS imported British shows, produced with a different video standard, that's how they did it.

The Apollo moon landings were done in a similar way and NASA lost the original slow scan video because there was a shortage of expensive recording tape at the time, and it tended to be reused. That's also how many Dr. Who episodes were lost.

Each star you see in that photograph is still trillions of miles away from its nearest neighbor. Your eye sees stars like sand on a beach, but the reality is that every section of that photograph is mostly empty space.

of course, a handful of sand is ALSO mostly empty space

it's truly amazing.

As it would just so happen just this morning, after yelling at one of the neighbor's kids to get off my lawn. The kid just told me that the largest photo ever taken was of my momma. So there...

...with gold bands.

Obama

... and to think that we probably witnessed thousands of civilizations in those 3+ minutes.

The music was chill, too.

but I could be wrong.

... but something tells me that the picture is made such that we are disregarding stars within the Milky Way. It "appears" those bright flashes were nebulae or supernovae from within the Andromeda galaxy.

But, like you, I could be wrong, as well.

pin prick in the whole universe.

I'm going to need a bigger printer.

Just once I'd like to see one with bouncy, happy music. I'm sure the astrophysicists are bouncy and happy when they make discoveries. It's joyful!

Cut 1 on here would work.

Andromeda Facts: http://space-facts.com/andromeda/
The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) is the closest large galaxy to the Milky Way and is one of only ten galaxies that can be seen unaided from the Earth. In approximately 4.5 billion years the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way are expected to collide. Andromeda is accompanied by at least 10 satellite galaxies the most notable of which is the Triangulum Galaxy.

Galaxy Profile
Designation: M31, NGC 224
Type: Spiral
Distance from Milky Way: 2.5 million light-years
Diameter: 260,000 light-years
Mass: 400 billion solar masses
Number of Stars: 1 trillion

Facts About Andromeda
While Andromeda is the largest galaxy in the Local Cluster it is not thought to be the most massive as the Milky May is thought to contain more dark matter making it the most massive
The Andromeda Galaxy is approaching the Milky Way at approximately 100 to 140 kilometres per second
The Andromeda Galaxy has a very crowded nucleus. Not only does it have a massive star cluster right at its heart, but it also has at least one supermassive black hole hidden at the core.
The spiral arms of the Andromeda Galaxy are being distorted by gravitational interactions with two companion galaxies, M32 and M110.
The Andromeda Galaxy has at least two spiral arms, plus a ring of dust that may have come from the smaller galaxy M32. Astronomers think that it may have interacted more closely with Andromeda several hundred million years ago.
The Andromeda Galaxy is the most distant object you can spot with the naked eye. You need a good spot away from bright lights in order to see it.

that is awesome!

all that is, and all that ever will be." Carl Sagan

Freaking awesome picture.

I wonder how many civilizations are looking back at us?