Putting stars in scope : 

This is a starry view of a globular cluster located about 162,000 light-years away in the largest and brightest of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The 120-light-year diameter of the globular cluster fills the entire frame of the image captured by @NASAHubble.

While these observations are done by space telescopes from hundreds of thousands of light-years away, a common misconception is that they’re captured by zooming in. While small telescopes may have the capability to zoom in and out to a certain extent, large telescopes do not. That means the size of the region of the sky a telescope can observe in a single observation has a fixed “field of view.”

The reason that the Hubble can observe objects of all different sizes has more to do with how far the object is from Earth. Entire galaxies that are relatively far away might take up the same amount of space in the sky as a globular cluster like the one pictured above. What if the object is too large? Image processors can stitch together multiple images spanning different part of the sky into a mosaic to create a single image.

Image description: A spherical collection of stars fills the image. The stars merge into a bright, bluish core at image center and form a sparse band around the core and out to the edges of the image. A few stars lie in front of the cluster, with visible diffraction spikes. The background is dark black.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. Girardi, F. Niederhofer

#NASA #ESA #Space #NASAHubble #Telescope #Astronomy #Stars #Perspective #Frame

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8 March 2024 ]