How did we got the IMAGES of our GALAXY and others when we've even not yet reached Neptune???

1 Answer
Nov 4, 2017

A few thoughts...

Explanation:

Your question puzzles me on several grounds, but I can say the following:

We have gone past Neptune, or at least Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 (which passed Neptune directly) have on our behalf.

If you look up into the night sky on a clear night, you may glimpse a small fuzzy patch of light near the "square of Pegasus".

What you are glimpsing is the bright centre of the Andromeda galaxy, which if you could see it all, subtends more than #3^@# in one direction and about #1^@# in the other. Compare that with the sun and moon, which subtend about #0.5^@#.

If you are in an area with little light pollution and point a decent camera on an RA drive towards Andromeda then you can capture quite striking images even from the surface of Earth.

Andromeda is about #2.5# million light years away. So we see it as it was #2.5# million years ago.

With the aid of Hubble and other telescopes in space, we can avoid the atmospheric effects that limit us on Earth and capture finer details.

We don't need to travel anywhere near as far as Neptune to capture some really amazing images.

Concerning images of our own galaxy, we do not have direct images of it from perspectives other than our own. Note that we do have some data from careful parallax based observations and other methods to help us construct computer models of plausible star positions. Combined with observations of other galaxies that appear to be of similar type, we can thereby produce reasonable approximations to how our own galaxy might look.