Mind-boggling resolution

Yesterday, this picture was posted at Astronomy Picture of the Day:

It's worth checking out the high-resolution version of this picture.

Those thousands of tiny dots are individual stars in another galaxy, millions of light-years away. Our best telescopes now cannot resolve the surface features of even a nearby star, but they can resolve the spaces between stars in neighboring galaxies, so that instead of appearing as diffuse smears of light, the individual pinpoints of starlight that comprise the galaxy may be detected. For some reason, nothing makes me feel as tiny as gazing into other galaxies.

Comments

[mica]

Wow, Carla. That's amazing. Thank you!

(been missing you in asdlc. hope all's well.)