• Question: how come we havn't been able to see every star in the universe in one picture?

    Asked by poppxx to Mike, Pip, Tianfu, Tim, Tom on 26 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Tom Lister

      Tom Lister answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      It would be a huge picture, to make it big enough for us too see each star that has been found. Some stars are only known because of the effects they have on other things, and other must be hidden behind closer objects, so they can’t be photographed anyway.

    • Photo: Philippa Bird

      Philippa Bird answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      Some are too far away, and do you have a camera that reaches all the way around the whole world?

    • Photo: Tim Stephens

      Tim Stephens answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      Some stars are so far away that the light that they emit has not even reached the earth yet, even though it’s been travelling towards us for millions of years. The Hubble space telescope spent some time staring at a single point in space a few years ago and captured the first pictures of galaxies that are really, really far away and are so faint that there is almost no light reaching us from them.
      There are some pictures here http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2004/07/
      There are also some composite pictures where observatories have taken a whole bunch of pictures and then stitched them together in a computer. Those don’t cover the whole sky, but are really spectacular:

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