by astroarchitect1 » Mon May 06, 2019 1:38 pm
Yes, not only is the camera traveling incredibly faster than light, but I have always been fascinated by the way galaxies look in photographs in general and how they would look to space travelers if they were to travel galactic distances. Somewhat difficult to understand because everything we look at here on earth, every object we see, we see in real time and because the size of the objects we look at are small we see them all, in their entirety, instantaneously. But when looking at incredibly large objects in space, for example a face on photo of a galaxy, basically all the light from that galaxy is hitting the camera (or your retina) at almost the same time and the appearance of that galaxy is correct in that it is representative of what that formation looked like X number of (light) years ago. But when we look at a galaxy that is tilted at say 45 degrees, we are not seeing it correctly. The light from a 100 thousand light year diameter galaxy is not getting to us all at the same time. The light from the closer edge of the galaxy is reaching us about 56 thousand years before the light from the far edge is. So our view of the galaxy may be correct for one of the edges, but the view of the other edge is from a different time and is showing us a different position of the stars compared to where the opposite side's ones were at that time. Which also leads me to wonder why, with this time delay, does the galaxy often still looks symmetrical and is not distorted in some way... can anyone with a better knowledge of this give me an answer to that?
Yes, not only is the camera traveling incredibly faster than light, but I have always been fascinated by the way galaxies look in photographs in general and how they would look to space travelers if they were to travel galactic distances. Somewhat difficult to understand because everything we look at here on earth, every object we see, we see in real time and because the size of the objects we look at are small we see them all, in their entirety, instantaneously. But when looking at incredibly large objects in space, for example a face on photo of a galaxy, basically all the light from that galaxy is hitting the camera (or your retina) at almost the same time and the appearance of that galaxy is correct in that it is representative of what that formation looked like X number of (light) years ago. But when we look at a galaxy that is tilted at say 45 degrees, we are not seeing it correctly. The light from a 100 thousand light year diameter galaxy is not getting to us all at the same time. The light from the closer edge of the galaxy is reaching us about 56 thousand years before the light from the far edge is. So our view of the galaxy may be correct for one of the edges, but the view of the other edge is from a different time and is showing us a different position of the stars compared to where the opposite side's ones were at that time. Which also leads me to wonder why, with this time delay, does the galaxy often still looks symmetrical and is not distorted in some way... can anyone with a better knowledge of this give me an answer to that?