Today is Mole Day, celebrating Avogadro's number. From 6:02am until 6:02pm. It should be until 10:50pm (ten to the twenty third hour.) Thanks, Alireza!
Andromeda
(If you can't see the stars, turn up the brightness.)
Pegasus is the trapezoid of four bright stars near the top, and Cassiopea is the smaller conglomeration stuck into the edge of the light polution, right in the center, about two thirds of the way down.
In the very middle of the picture, just slightly to the right, is a small fuzzy blob with a bright center. See it? That is M-31, a large spiral galaxy. If you live somewhere dark, you can go outside about 9 pm, look straight up, and see it for yourself. This is the furthest thing in the universe you can see with your own eyes.
To someone looking up from a planet in that galaxy, our own galaxy, the Milky Way looks just about the same.
Debbie asked "what does RAW format mean?"
Raw format files are picture files with their data representing twelve bit, greyscale pixels with a map to the Beyer filter to color the image. Twenty four bit color, used for color displays and graphics files such as TIFF, use eight bits each for red, green and blue primary colors. Because the color information is encoded by the camera hardware in the Beyer filter, Raw file pixels are half the size of twenty four bit color pixels, as are the files themselves.
Raw file pixels also hold more information than their eight bit counterparts. The extra four bits are available to adjust the image without losing any data:
Raw files from cameras with different image sensors are not compatible. The Raw files I have are called NEF files because they come from a Nikon camera, and they require specific software such as the two programs I looked at yesterday, to process the data into an image. In addition to those two programs, there are also Bibble and Capture One. They both have free trials, so I may look at them later.
