3.11.05

Picture of the Day - the First Light



Photo and explanation from 'Bad Astronomy'

"In any deep image of the sky, the bright objects are of course the easiest to notice. Usually, the astronomers display the contrast in an image such that the bright things are easy to see, and anything faint is set to black. But in this case, the astronomers wanted to see the extremely faint objects. To do this, they masked out the bright objects and then upped the contrast… way up.
What pops out of the image is displayed in the bottom part of the image. The masked foreground objects are obvious enough. But what’s that fuzzy, glowing material weaving its way in the background?


According to the astronomers who took the image, most if not all of that diffuse glow comes from the very first stars ever born in the Universe."

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