>NASA was founded in 1958>Lifetime budget: $1.5 trillion>This is the clearest picture of another star that we haveOkay, then.
>>17028457Turns out taking photos from billion million kilometers away is kinda hard
That's pretty good.
>>17028457That's a spicy meatball.
>>17028457Post the best picture we had of another star in 1958
NASA is a tax embezzlement scheme.
>>17028457being incredulous is not an argument
>>17028457space is really really big
>>17028457>VLTI reconstructed view of the surface of Antares AVLTI is ESO, THOUGHNASA has nothing to do with it.
>>17028470Yes it is, retard.
>>17028476What! How could you say that!
>>17028475>VLTI>Very Large Telescopeclowns. first they launch artemis on april fools day, now they're giving their giant fake toys toddler names
>>17028457That's really not a lot of money for that amount of time
>>17028468that's all of modern government
>>17028457How do you explain this then?
>>17028457because astronomy has nothing to do with getting pretty pictures to please smoothbrains.
>>17028705explain this!
>yeah bro, the science™ resembles a series of meaningless digital composite slop>but you should trust its reallove the circular logic on display in this thread
>>17028815So, let me get this straight. We can send animals to humans to the moon. We can land sophisticated machinery on a tiny fucking asteroid. But we can't look really far? That's the fucking limit?
>>17028457usecase for space exploration?
>>17028882finding aliens so they can once and for all brainwash violent goyim cattle into becoming civilized human beings with their super advanced technology
>>17028457Thanks reddit post from 7 years ago that has nothing to do with NASA>>17028872The resolving power for better pictures of "shit that is 620 lightyear (5.8 quadrillion km) away" like Antares in OP's pic, requires ridiculously more massive telescopes than what we have now.Like 40 JWSTs worth of satellite telescope.
>>17028872Leave this place and only get back once you understand the size of space.
>>17028872https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system
>>Lifetime budget: $1.5 trillionAnd how much of that was spent not just on astronomy, but on taking that image? Zero dollars.If you are not a flattie, the progress is undeniable. Pic related was the best image back then, of an object that wasn't discovered until 1965. It was the first quasar, and the most distant object known at the time. This image was taken with photographic plates using the 200 inch Palomar telescope.
>>17029332And here is the same object with Hubble imaging. These don't even use the latest cameras on Hubble, much less JWST. You can now see the faint blob is a relativistic jet, launched by the supermassive black hole in the center of the quasar. Back in 1958, quasars hadn't been discovered, and no one knew if black holes really existed in nature, much less supermassive ones.
>>17029332That first quasar had a huge redshift for the time of 0.15. So astonishingly distant, it was published in Nature.Now the redshift record for galaxies is about z=14. Orders of magnitude more distant. Not just distant, but now telescopes view back far enough that the light travel time is a significant fraction of the age of the universe, and so we can now observe galaxies as they were in the first few million years. Unthinkable in the 1950s.Data like this was completely unthinkable back then, infrared astronomy hadn't even invented.
NASA is a space agency charged with space exploration, not imaging distant stars. The leaps in planetary science are pretty incredible. Images were very shit before fast digital detectors, something NASA pioneered in astronomy for Hubble.
>>17029341Even Hubble is a huge revolution.
>>17029343But nothing compares to going there, like Cassini.
space is big
>>17029353Op's iq is small
