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Heroes

Nasa has released the most mind-blowing picture of space. Seriously. Holy cow.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been sending us back eye-popping pictures for a long time now, but this one may top them all. Profound.

Look what the folks at NASA/ESA just did.

They've released the most incredibly detailed panoramic picture from the Hubble Space Telescope of one of our celestial neighbors, the Andromeda galaxy. Know that one?

Here's where Andromeda is.


The image is actually 411 high-resolution photos stitched together seamlessly to make one honkin' big super-image. The full version is 3.9 billion pixels in size and takes up 4.3 GBof hard drive space. It's a huge picture, a picture totally packed with detail. That's why it's so awesome to zoom in and around it.

You can go from this…

That's a lot of stars.

To this…

Yipes. Wait. Every dot is a star?

To this.

Wow.

It's just more and more stars upon stars upon stars. Whew.

The feeling I get from this image is profound.

It's hard to roam through the heavens like this without having a bit of a spiritual experience. At first, of course, it's just mind-blowing to think of how many stars there are. And how many planets. What an astounding thing to be part of, as Neil deGrasse Tyson put it here.

Is it possible there's nowhere like Earth out there?

Doesn't seem that way to me.

Could there really be no other life among all those stars?

There has to be, right?

But here's the thing.

In all of this incredible hugeness, way down on one side, tucked away in the corner, is a little blue ocean-covered ball. And I find that just thinking the word "home" has a new meaning for me now, full of warmth and a deep sense of, well, love. How precious this place is. How lucky we are to be here. And how foolish we'd be to ruin it.

Here's a video tour of the panorama, and here's where you can go exploring Andromeda on your own.

Bye, now. See ya when you get back.

Fact-Check Time: The video says the full image is only 1.5 billion pixels. Only —ha! That's referring to one of the copped versions NASA released. The original is 3.9 billion pixels.

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