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View submission: Ask Anything Wednesday - Physics, Astronomy, Earth and Planetary Science
You may want to check the Wikipedia article on Orion Nebula. It has the very first photograph of the nebula taken in 1880 and then a much improved long-exposure shot of it taken in 1883 - which was the first that demonstrated that there are fascinating things invisible to the naked eye but possible to reveal with long-exposure photography.
And on the same page the article's title image is a mind-blowing composite picture of the nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Also, you may try searching for Edwin Hubble's original photos of the Andromeda Galaxy. And then look for the composite giga-panorama which captures only a part of the Andromeda Galaxy and has billions of individual stars visible in it.
Comment by sandgroper2 at 27/04/2023 at 19:12 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Thanks, yeah I had seen those. It's the kind of thing that triggered my desire to see the images from the best telescope of each time period.
You've given me a good lead to what I was thinking of. I'll devote some time on the weekend to identifying the most advanced telescope of each decade, say, and looking for images of the same object from each.