Starship Asterisk*

Where is the Horsehead Nebula in this picture?

Two questions: (1) Do we, or do our computers, have the capability to produce an accurate image of the galaxy that was lensed? And (2) Does this sort of lensing let us look further away with our telescopes than would otherwise be the case with no lensing?

Maybe this represents a collision between two (or maybe three?) galaxies that is going on right now --?

OF

It seems improbable that dark sand could somehow spread out from point sources in the way shown. This stuff looks exactly like crude oil, emerging from little springs. Wow!

OF

Chris, perhaps we'll need to send a "janitor" satellite up there someday to sweep up the dead stuff. Or will the dead ones drift away within a reasonable time due to being perturbed by the moon and sun's gravity?

OF

Chris, yes, that makes sense. I was interpreting the pixtelization (is that a word?) plus maybe some high-contrast processing of the image as showing a bunch of big rocks hurtling through space. I feel better now...

Thanks for being so patient!

Don

Chris, thanks for trying to help me figure out what's going on here. I say "trying", because I'm still a bit fuzzy about this. As in: It was my notion that the Hubble photo resolved the tail, showing that it was comprised of thousands of individual points of light, and I assumed that each ...

The tail of this object is evidently comprised of many chunks of stuff large enough to be individually detected by Hubble. I don't know what size rocks can be resolved by Hubble at this distance, but it's pretty evident that these are big rocks. If so, how could the whimpy light pressure from the su...

I'd love to see a tidbit about the visual observability of objects that are posted. Good! Looks like we have a popular landslide vote on its way for this, it's picking up steam! (Anyone else?) And I appreciate the thoughtful comments from you folks concerning this subject. I realize that the APOD t...

It's pretty obvious to amateur astronomers that your APOD's of the moon, planets, and other familiar objects are or are not visible to some extent in amateur-size telescopes. But I've often wondered if I'd have a chance of glimpsing some of the finer deep sky objects that Hubble or observatories cap...