Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Andromeda Galaxy panorama

Voting period is over. Please don't add any new votes. Voting period ends on 27 Oct 2024 at 17:11:33 (UTC)

 
Original – This is the largest and sharpest image ever taken of the Andromeda galaxy. You would need more than 600 HD television screens to display the whole image. It is the biggest Hubble image ever released and shows over 100 million stars and thousands of star clusters embedded in a section of the galaxy’s pancake-shaped disc stretching across over 40 000 light-years.
 
ALT1 - Full resolution
Reason
This is the largest (and maybe even sharpest) image ever taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. High EV because it shows the star density of the Andromeda Galaxy, and an absolutely amazing image overall. Very surprised it hasn't been nominated yet. There's a 0.7 gigabyte version (File:Andromeda Galaxy M31 - Heic1502a Full resolution.tiff), but that one isn't transcluded anywhere and is so big that it needs to be downloaded to open. Thanks to Chris Woodrich, we now have the full-sized, 1.5 billion-pixel image.
Articles in which this image appears
Zooming in on the Andromeda Galaxy, Andromeda Galaxy, Andromeda (constellation)
FP category for this image
Wikipedia:Featured pictures/Space/Panorama
Creator
NASA
That would be marvelous. SirMemeGod18:23, 17 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support ALT1 - Huge image, excellent quality.  — Chris Woodrich (talk) 18:45, 17 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support ALT1Yann (talk) 18:52, 17 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • I am pretty sure all those small dots filling the background are noise, not stars. It's measurement or detection noise, somewhat similar to high ISO noise (but more intense). The image has scientific value even with all that noise, because lots of tiny stars are still discernible (perhaps for first time ever) within the noise, though not easily. However, for a galaxy photo in an encyclopedia, the excessive noise misleads, coming across as stars. It's just too noisy IMO. -Oppose. Bammesk (talk) 02:02, 18 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Bammesk: From what I've gathered from HubbleSite and overall specifications for the Hubble, those objects are more likely than not individual astronomical bodies. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey did a similar look at the Milky Way's center, and it looks exactly the same when zoomed in. The link Chris posted actually sums it up really well. SirMemeGod12:26, 18 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This confirms it. "Though the galaxy is over 2 million light-years away, The Hubble Space Telescope is powerful enough to resolve individual stars in a 61,000-light-year-long stretch of the galaxy’s pancake-shaped disk. It's like photographing a beach and resolving individual grains of sand. And there are lots of stars in this sweeping view -- over 100 million, with some of them in thousands of star clusters seen embedded in the disk." SirMemeGod13:13, 18 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Promoted File:Andromeda Galaxy M31 - Heic1502a Full resolution.jpg --– 🌻 Hilst (talk | contribs) 17:17, 27 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]