Background Galaxies

Andrew Gaspurr

Andrew Gaspurr
Hello there!

As you all surely have seen over and over again space beyond the boundaries of the Milky Way is dotted with numerous visible galaxies, the two most prominent and omnipresent being the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds. There are some others as well and for quite some time I have been wondering which ones they may be.

I took a HighRes screenshot and cut out the two I wanted to present here and compared them with current imagery and their corresponding position towards each other:

Background_Galaxies_01.jpg

So, I think the left one is easier. I think it's the Pinwheel Galaxy in Ursa Major. First I thought it might be the Whirlpool Galaxy but that one has another clearly visible nucleus of a partially absorbed galaxy with it, so it would have a pretty distinctive look. Out of this reason I vote for the Pinwheel.

The right one is tricky. It seems to be an intact Spiral Galaxy with a large bulge and a companion galaxy just within its reach. After having a look at various starmaps I could only find the good old Andromeda Galaxy with M32 being its Companion Dwarf Galaxy. However, it's alignment ingame would have been horizontally mirrored and I don't know if that would be an oversight or my amateur astronomy skills. I mean, rolling the ship on its back lets you see Andromeda on its back as well but then M32 would have to be 'on top' of it. Strange, isn't it?

Any of you folks out there having an idea, what this might be?

Thanks for reading, fly safe!
 

Ziljan

Ziljan
It's without a doubt M31 and M32. Andromeda and the dwarf companion. The in game image looks like it was taken in a small optical telescope and had been over exposed. When you do this, the central bulge tends to bleed out and look bigger than it is relative to the disk. Wheras the professional image below it has been heavily processed to remove these kind of equipment based artifacts.
 

Mephane

Mephane
Ziljan said:
It's without a doubt M31 and M32. Andromeda and the dwarf companion. The in game image looks like it was taken in a small optical telescope and had been over exposed. When you do this, the central bulge tends to bleed out and look bigger than it is relative to the disk. Wheras the professional image below it has been heavily processed to remove these kind of equipment based artifacts.
Click to expand...

Or rather, the disk is so faint that without sufficiently long exposures, you get little more than the core of Andromeda. The full disc would actually be larger than a full moon in the sky, if its outer reaches weren't so faint.
 

Ziljan

Ziljan
Mephane said:
Or rather, the disk is so faint that without sufficiently long exposures, you get little more than the core of Andromeda. The full disc would actually be larger than a full moon in the sky, if its outer reaches weren't so faint.
Click to expand...

In order to image the disk, you are forced to over expose the core. When this happens, the core size is exaggerated and the detail is washed out. Much in the same way that bright stars look larger even though geometrically, most have no angular size at these distances and are mathematical dimensionless points of light. Even in some professional photos the size of the core is often overstated for aesthetic reasons. But yes, the Galaxy itself is HUGE on the night sky. About 8 times as wide as the moon.
 
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