Trust me I do not have any extra ordinary interest in galaxies and pictures taken through space telescopes but often one finds things that are worth mentioning to the masses. The thing to wonder is that what is so interesting about the galaxy picture you see above?
The Sharpest Galaxy Image Ever Taken
The picture you see above is rescaled and resized version of the sharpest image ever taken of the large “grand design” spiral galaxy M81. The actual size of the original picture that was taken through the Hubble Space Telescope is no less than 700 MB alone (almost 1 GB wow!). The image was released on 9 June 2007 at the American Astronomical Society Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii.
The Hubble Telescope and The Spiral Galaxy
Thanks to the sharp view of the Hubble Space Telescope it was successful enough to resolve individual stars, along with open star clusters, globular star clusters, and even glowing regions of fluorescent gas of the galaxy that is located 11.6 million light-years away.
The original image has a resolution of 22620×15200 pixels and a size of 706 MB only!
http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/original/heic0710a.tif
You can also download a low resolution 4000×2688 version of the image which is only 6.2 MB in size!
http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/publicationjpg/heic0710a.jpg
and if you are lazy enough to give it a try. Just see the image posted on top of this story and it is just a smaller version of the original.
[tags]hubble-space-telescope, spiral-galaxy-image, spiral-galaxy-picture, telescope-pictures, telescope-images, space-images, space-pictures[/tags]
Saad Hamid is a blogger and technology enthusiast from Pakistan. Connect with him on
{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
WOW!!! Ncie share DJ. I think, I have seen this somewhere before… But I can’t recall where…
I hope you are not confusing this image with the worlds biggest image according to size because both of them are two different things. This image is hardly a month old.
OMG !! WOW !! Flush u Rock
!! NICE JiGGz !! 
i’m gonna download it
… 700 MB :O !!
700 megs? That is one gigantic image haha
Downloading !! … 4 % Done !!
I have heard about these type of images . Images taken by NASA can sometime surpass 1 GB too . Do you think a normal PC will be able to render this 700 MB image .
Imagine if you have a couple of these images as your wallpaper. I wonder how long it would take to render them.
Madhur – your video card could probably handle it buddy hehe
errmmm.. looks like a sci fi movie =p.. starwars ki tarhan =D
but.. the 700mb part.. just scares me :$
still 37 %
…. !!
“resolution of 22620×15200 pixels and a size of 706 MB”
wow ! :O
Gellery: http://heritage.stsci.edu/gallery/gallery.html
There have been images released by NASA that are as big as 2.3 gb. Pretty high resolution.. wonder how my face would look in that
Wow! That’s amazing! My PC will surely explode if I open that one LOL
Wow! I will download this! Anyway, I love this blog.
Great post! I have deep love for space and galaxies, 22620×15200 pixels resolution means a lot.
And sorry! I cant download such a file on my 128Kbps internet connection.
I’m DLing the 700 MB version!
I looked at the 6.2 MB one and noticed something. At the VERY very bottom right it looks like a galaxy being pulled. Is that a black hole? A new galaxy? a Bad angle? What?