Picture from ALMA of the antennae galaxies (awesome!)

[Teh_Saccade]

Thought you guys'd want a preview

[vh]

fix'd

its beautiful! but where/how was this taken? preview? from what?

i thought alma was a radio telescope array!

[Teh_Saccade]

It's almost like you can see them spiraling into each other - the level of detail is truly astonishing

[Teh_Saccade]

Well, it's not exactly a "picture" like a photograph is, in the traditional sense.
Most of the very high powered 'telescopes', such as Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), will use other frequencies to capture the differing emmisions from objects such as the ones displayed above.
As the name suggests, ALMA can "see" light in the millimeter and submillimeter spectrums - that's about 1,000 times longer than that which we can see with our naked eyes.

Longer waves can travel longer distances with less noise or loss (think of the bass and treble in a passing car's stereo).

This particular image is the result of 12 of the 66 radio antennas at ALMA, working together, utilising various spectrums, to express what they discern by providing us with (some rather stunning) visual interpretations

The colours have been retouched to provide for a more dramatic image. You can quite easily see the stars, nebulae and gasses that will form new stars (or, rather, are forming new stars - what we are seeing is around 45,000,000 years in the past...)

When all of ALMA's radio antennas are completed and linked, they will act as one single giant telescope with a lens diameter of 6 kilometres!
Therefore, the more antennas used, the better the imaging.

Furthermore, the largest single telescope on Earth atm is the Large Binocular Telescope in Obs, Arizona, with an effective aperture diameter of 12 metres.
Us Brits got fed up of being outshone by you yanks, so we decided to up the ante
(actually, some of the guys at Manchester and a few from Cambridge are Americans)

[vh]

why do people bother make huge mirrors when they can just have smaller ones located close by? And what are the effects of seperating the telescopes more? does the image quality degrade? When photographing images like the moon, a planet, or a close star, does parallax come into play? how is this solved?

[Teh_Saccade]

Well, the larger the effective aperture - the more light can be captured and, so, the better the images and results.
With many smaller ones, it requires a lot of extra work and processing in order to make an effective montage of the lot and combine that into one image (albeit, the results are often more exact).

ALMA works using something called interferometry - that is, it collects many different 'images' of electromagnetic waves and then overlays them to produce a composite [image].
Traditional telescopes use only light from the visual spectrum, some use infrared or whatever, and the larger scientific telescopes and arrays employ a variety of other techniques.

It is quite rare for any observatory to employ only the visual spectrum these days

Yes, paralax is an effect that will have an impact on any observation, especially when looking at something so distant that it requires several "viewings" when the earth is facing the correct way (leading to ever more layering of images!), however - this is something that is quite well understood and employed (often as a measuring device for astronomical bodies), and there are often some very good auto-correction algorithms designed to take into account things such as this.

However, if you are wanting to take pictures of the moon, sun or stars using a home kit - it is unlikely that you will have to expose the film for too long for most shots.
There are telescopes that will have a function to slowly move, to "absorb" the motion and still provide a clear and precise image.

Bob Austin (no relation to me ) is a very keen photographer and is a depth of knowledge on taking pictures with kit from home:
http://www.astronomy-pictures.com/Bobs-Astronomy-Pictures.htm

[Teh_Saccade]

By "expose the film", I think I just mean exposure time - even I don't have a camera that uses film any more!

[Teh_Saccade]

Here you go, Mudkipz:
http://www.almaobservatory.org/en/about-alma/how-does-alma-work

[vh]

this one looks pretty nice



and this one will make a nice new galaxy for ubox!

also, try modifying your posts to save space/pages

[deoxy99]

-pic snip-
fix'd

its beautiful! but where/how was this taken? preview? from what?

i thought alma was a radio telescope array!

What did you fix?

[vh]

the picture link was broken before...i fixed it....

[Bla]

The second one you posted, Mudkipz, looks like the Pinwheel Galaxy. There's an image of it in a much better quality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:M101_hires_STScI-PRC2006-10a.jpg
Well, it's 15,852 × 12,392 pixels, so I just linked to its page.

Nice image of the Antennae Galaxies. Here's another image of them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Antennae_galaxies_xl.jpg

The red clouds look interesting. They look of like a blurred version of the red areas on the other image. But they clearly don't fit that well on each other.

[Teh_Saccade]

Well, the primary function of most scientific observatories isn't to produce pretty pictures, man
The differences in colour are simply expressions of the different wavelengths that are received - they could be neon pink and green if you really wanted!

[vh]

IoPSP!

we nid an institution of prettie space piktures

i feel bad for those scientists who stare at grainy black and white blobs all day long, it must get boring/sad

[atomic7732]

That's why I'd rather be a meteorologist. I'll do amateur astronomy, and citizen science on Zooniverse to make my contributions for the space interest in me.

I heard from a retired professional astronomer, that amateur astronomy is better. He said something like "There's nothing better than setting up your own telescope" or something. I mean a professional, or most at least, take a telescope already calibrated, they write a program (more or less) for the telescope to run, they go to sleep, wake up the next day and look over data.

Meteorology seems more involved. You sit at a computer with the latest data and review it and (in the NWS) issue warnings, and assess different situations and stuff and keep putting out new discussions. In the NHC, you just track the tropical cyclones, write advisories and discussions on them and other locations where formation is possible. More of the writing is done at the NHC (as far as I know), as the NWS are more automated (select the part of the situation that applies, click whatever the button is to submit, and you're done).