I used 1.7 gigabytes of storage to download the largest flat photo ever taken

NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton (University of Washington, USA), B. F. Williams (University of Washington, USA), L. C. Johnson (University of Washington, USA), the PHAT team, and R. Gendler.

For some reason, I doubt steemit will support the whole thing being uploaded here.

This image above, taken by Hubble and released in 2015, is just a compressed version, but the real image comes in at a mind-crushing 1.5 billion pixels, and, in the fullest version, 4.3 total gigabytes. My computer did not have anything that would support a PSB file, and I;m not spending a dime on adobe Photoshop just to get one picture. So I settled for the slightly compressed 400,000,000 pixel counterpart.

Now why exactly did I do this? Why did I immobilize my computer for 45 minutes while waiting for it to finish getting the whole thing together?

Well for one, its just rather cool to say I have the largest image file in the world on my PC, and for another, its also because zooming in on this image and seeing its full scope is truly one of the most humbling things I've ever witnessed. You can go all the way down to the point where you just see a few collections of pixels, each one of them a star, as you zoom out they become lost in a sea of millions more pixels and, literally, million more stars.

In that one region of Andromeda, the should be about 250 Billion stars, (estimates vary), however NASA says the image shows "only" about 100 Million. This is because although it may not seem like it, the stars seen even in the full-size 4.3 gig. version of the image, most of the stars that are there cannot be seen. They are simply too dim, any red dwarf, yellow dwarf, (like our sun), and even most blue dwarfs will be invisible. The only stars that show up individually are the brightest blue dwarfs, and several varieties of giants, but even the standard sub-giants and small red-giants will also miss capture.

Let that all sink in, this is an image the size of a short HD movie, and yet it really only shows us 0.04% of whats really there. . .

Save for all the typically existential stuff, its also just a beautiful thing to look at, zoom in of various parts and find small clusters, nebulous clouds and other stuff, and you too can get the image in a variety of formats here: http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1502a/

Mind this, the full size image requires some specific capabilities to open, and some may not have the means/storage even for the 1.7 GB version, but it offers numerous versions all the way down to a JPEG, so you can walk away with something.