That one comment about andromeda at a stargazing event changed how i see photos

Last month at a local park meetup, some kid pointed at my screen and said 'that galaxy is from 2.5 million years ago, not today.' I never really thought about time delay in astrophotography before. How do you process the idea that what you're capturing is ancient history?

3 comments

3 Comments

alice9289d ago

2.5 million years is a mind-bending number, but honestly I don't think it changes anything about what you're actually looking at. The photons hitting your sensor right now are the same photons that left that galaxy, the light itself is real and present. Maybe it's just me but when I take a photo of a mountain, that mountain also looked different 0.0001 seconds ago due to wind and erosion, nobody says that photo is fake history. The kid was technically correct but kind of missing the point, photography is always a moment from the past no matter what you're shooting. Your camera captured light that was already on its way to Earth, that's not ancient history that's just the universe working exactly the way it always has.

zara_sanchez9d ago

Honestly when my buddy tried to explain this whole light travel time thing to me I just shrugged and kept looking at the picture. I've got this photo I took of the night sky a few years back, just with my phone, and it's got a faint smudge that's supposedly a galaxy millions of light years away. Knowing that the light is super old doesn't make the photo less real or special to me. What matters is that I was there, I saw it, and I captured what I could. The numbers are cool but they don't change the fact that the photo is a memory of a moment I had. So yeah, I'm with you on this one, the kid was being a smartass but the photo is still the photo.

paige1669d ago

Does knowing the age of the light change how you value the photo, or is it just a cool fact that doesn't really matter in the end?