Kaden and I ventured into the Idaho sagebrush to take this Milky Way photo and talk about space. Quality father/son time as he talks about the Russian space program and I try to line up the camera with a faint space cloud.
This photo is just a tiny piece of our Galaxy. No human has ever photographed the entire Galaxy (because we are in it). Suppose you wanted to take a single photo of the outside of your house, but you are in the kitchen. And so you try to leave your kitchen, to get outside, but it takes you 100 million years to do this. That's basically the issue with photographing the entire Milky Way Galaxy.
For those of you interested in the nerdy numbers behind this conundrum, we would have to travel 50,000 light years "up" or "down" to get outside the Milky Way enough to photograph the whole thing at once. Is it possible to travel this distance in our lifetimes? Consider that the fastest space probe travels at 430,000 miles per hour, which sounds fast, but is only traveling at 6% of the speed of light. It would take this probe 2,000 years to travel a single light year. We'd have to spend *100 million years* traveling at 430,000mph to get our "full frame" photo of the Milky Way Galaxy.
It's important to remember, we are still relatively early to space...the first full photo of the earth was taken a little over 50 years ago, when astronauts aboard Apollo 17 photographed the "Blue Marble." Future technologies may allow us to traverse the heavens much faster than we can currently conceptualize. If we sent a "camera probe" on a Milky Way photo mission TODAY, humans in 100 years would likely be able to send something that would pass it up.
In the meantime, I'll enjoy the seemingly endless beauty of our night sky.
This photo is just a tiny piece of our Galaxy. No human has ever photographed the entire Galaxy (because we are in it). Suppose you wanted to take a single photo of the outside of your house, but you are in the kitchen. And so you try to leave your kitchen, to get outside, but it takes you 100 million years to do this. That's basically the issue with photographing the entire Milky Way Galaxy.
For those of you interested in the nerdy numbers behind this conundrum, we would have to travel 50,000 light years "up" or "down" to get outside the Milky Way enough to photograph the whole thing at once. Is it possible to travel this distance in our lifetimes? Consider that the fastest space probe travels at 430,000 miles per hour, which sounds fast, but is only traveling at 6% of the speed of light. It would take this probe 2,000 years to travel a single light year. We'd have to spend *100 million years* traveling at 430,000mph to get our "full frame" photo of the Milky Way Galaxy.
It's important to remember, we are still relatively early to space...the first full photo of the earth was taken a little over 50 years ago, when astronauts aboard Apollo 17 photographed the "Blue Marble." Future technologies may allow us to traverse the heavens much faster than we can currently conceptualize. If we sent a "camera probe" on a Milky Way photo mission TODAY, humans in 100 years would likely be able to send something that would pass it up.
In the meantime, I'll enjoy the seemingly endless beauty of our night sky.
Full Size: https://astrob.in/full/e0171f/0/
