First images from Euclid are in

Really impressive work, thanks for sharing. The video, that is -- the astronomy is indistinguishable from magic and thus way beyond the reach of words like "impressive", obviously. I do find it a little funny that physics is in such a jam that "look at more stuff" is an important next step, but godspeed nonetheless.

ETA: For those who love space but are similarly OOTL on the specifics of modern missions: this is from a telescope launched to the L2 point (next to Webb!) last July, and is currently a bit over 1/6th of the way through it's expected lifetime.

Details here: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Euclid... and obv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid_%28spacecraft%29

In comparison to Webb, it's focused on ~visible light surveys of the medium to far range, whereas Webb was built for ~infrared investigations of very distant objects. It was budgeted around 1/4th the cost of Webb (and ended up being ~1/20th due to Webb's costs running from $1B to $10B...) See https://www.jameswebbdiscovery.com/other-missions/euclid/euc...

If you're looking for a new wallpaper, it would be hard to beat this 8000x8000 pic it took of the Perseus galaxy cluster, casually depicting 100,000 galaxies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid_%28spacecraft%29#/media... The discoverer of galaxies, Kant, would literally weep. We're lucky to live when we do!

I agree wholeheartedly with all of your sentiments, but I don't think that Kant discovered galaxies or had much interest in them. That honor goes to Messier or Hubble, I believe.

Messier catalogued many objects, some of which were galaxies, but he did not know what they were. It was Hubble who first figured out (in the 1920s) that there were definitely separate galaxies.

https://lco.global/spacebook/galaxies/history-discovery/

> I do find it a little funny that physics is in such a jam that "look at more stuff" is an important next step

Observation is the most basic step of science. By viewing, we can find evidence of theoretical concepts or see something that conflicts those theories so they can be discarded or tweaked. It's not like there are experiments that could be used to test theories, so observing is all there is

Life on Earth is the same. If we are to get off Earth, we need to know what life to bring with us. We need to look a lot more, and much more closely at all the evolutionary products out there to make those decisions (if we arrogant humans can indeed even manage the intricacies of such an endeavor).

That’s why I love this fun fact so much :) He spent a good deal of his life on natural science before turning to philosophy, not unlike Newton and Liebniz — he just happened to be way better at philosophy than science. It doesn’t help that Newton’s plan was alchemy-based, ofc.

Anyway, from Kant’s Wikipedia:

  In the Universal Natural History, Kant laid out the nebular hypothesis, in which he deduced that the Solar System had formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula. Kant also correctly deduced that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he theorized formed from a much larger spinning gas cloud. He further suggested that other distant "nebulae" might be other galaxies. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy, for the first time extending it beyond the solar system to galactic and intergalactic realms. From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on the sciences throughout his life