Is it normal that i don't believe "them" and i want to see the universe myself?

Ok its not that I don't believe everything they (nasa, government, etc) say about the universe and what it looks like. And what with pictures and all, it's hard to question what they present to us BUT I would still like to see the universe for myself. I mean how do we really know all those hubble telescope pics aren't just a fluke or an error of the telescope? How do we know what we're looking at is what we think we are looking at? And I know they're are things such as virgin galactic which brings you into space, but I don't want to simply float above earth I wanna be all up and through space and shit. I want to see with my own eyes what it looks like and not rely on info they present us. Normal?

Is It Normal?
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  • I'm sorry I told you so many words! I just get really excited about space.

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  • You really need to look past nasa and your government for information about the universe. And so far as "seeing it for yourself".... I dont think you even really get the concept, or the enormity, or any of the basic principles some of us understand about near space, the galaxy and beyond. Otherwise you wouldnt be asking to see it like a kid whos sceptical about the tooth fairy

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    • No I actually do get it, smart ass

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  • Oh, also, I'm totally with you on the desire to float through space and look at things, but in reality, it wouldn't be that interesting looking. Things in space are really big and really, really, really far apart. You could easily fly through an asteroid field and never know it, and galaxies are much bigger than asteroid fields. In terms of telling what a galaxy really looks like, getting close to it doesn't do you much good. If you get close to a galaxy, it doesn't look like a galaxy anymore, it looks like a bunch of stars. Case in point: you are inside a galaxy right now. It isn't terribly exciting, is it (I mean, I think it is, but I'm a nerd)? It would be really useful for scientific reasons to be able to teleport closer to distant galaxies in order to examine individual regions and get more detailed data, but as far as getting the aesthetic of things, it's best to keep your distance. If you want to look at individual planets, that's different, but the Hubble telescope is usually used to take images of things like star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies, which are way too big for the idea of looking floating around and at them up close to be very meaningful.

    I'm not sure if I'm explaining it this well. Here's an analogy: floating through space to look at the kind of things that the Hubble telescope photographs would be like shrinking to the size of a dust mite to read a book. You'd learn a lot about the bumps on the paper, but you wouldn't learn anything about the plot.

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  • Ok, this is actually a subject I know a bit about, so I'll do my best to answer your questions.

    We know the Hubble images aren't just errors because we've taken many images of the objects with different telescopes, and they match up. I've personally used a research telescope to photograph galaxy NGC 2976, and the photographs I took match images we get from the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes (though of course I couldn't get the kind of image quality from an Earth based telescope as you can from a telescope outside the Earth's atmosphere). There are details you can see in the space telescope images that you can't see in my images, but you can tell they're the same object.

    Also, the images you see of celestial objects are often composites of multiple images. When I photographed NGC 2976, I took many separate short exposure images with different filters, then made a composite image with them digitally. There are several reasons for this. It allows you to adjust the exposure time and noise reduction for each colour filter, which is particularly important if some of your filters let through more light than others. Another reason is tracking errors. Large telescopes do what's called "tracking", which is moving to compensate for the rotation of the Earth while you're taking your pictures. If your telescope doesn't have tracking, your pictures come out with serious motion blur and streaking (look up "star trails" to see examples of long exposure pictures with no tracking), especially if they're zoomed in very far (which is always the case if you're taking a picture through a telescope) or you use a long exposure time. The telescope I was using has tracking, but sometimes there are errors in tracking or vibrations that make the tracking get off. If you take one long exposure picture, any small tracking error would ruin the image. With lots of short exposure images, however, you can weed out the pictures that get ruined by tracking errors or vibrations. You can also remove images that have bright lines due to reflections off satellites, dead pixels, etc. By combining those images to create a composite, you can still get a true colour image with wonderful detail, but you don't have to waste as much telescope time (which can be expensive) or risk having your image be ruined.

    The reason I brought this technique up is that if the images we took of galaxies were flukes or random errors, this technique wouldn't work. The technique requires that you take many, many images (I think I took 100 to 150) that are almost exactly identical. Also, if these images were errors due to the fact that I used a digital telescope, they'd be different from film images, wouldn't they? Yet my images matched those taken in the 1950s (I checked because there was a bright object in the galaxy that I thought might be a supernova. It wasn't, but if it had been it wouldn't have been in the picture from the 1950s, because supernovae don't last that long). (cont…)

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    • Also, NASA isn't the only organisation that takes images of space. There are a variety of pretty much completely unaffiliated scientific organisations internationally that take separate images of these things, and they match up. There are loads of space telescopes other than the Hubble, and many of them aren't affiliate with NASA at all. ISA, ESA, DLR, KARI, IKI, CNES, and ISAS are all non-NASA space organisations (not affiliated with the US government) that have put telescopes into space. If there was some conspiracy about making fake images of space, it couldn't just be a US government thing, it would have to be huge and international. There are also various Earth based telescopes and astronomers that aren't affiliated with governments at all, so they'd have to be in on it, too.

      Such a conspiracy wouldn't make any sense or benefit anybody. It would deprive everyone (including the people who are be in it) of the technological advances that come with better understanding of our universe. This includes a lot of military applications that the governments funding this would miss out on. For example, LIDAR, which is used to measure atmospheric conditions in order to adjust adaptive optics telescopes, can also be used to identify whether distant vehicles are friendly or enemy. GPS's, which obviously have non-military use but are extremely valuable to the military, wouldn't work if we didn't account for Einstein's theory of relativity.

      …which brings me to another point. We've developed technology that depends completely on data we've gotten from images of celestial bodies. If we hadn't observed that Mercury's orbit is a bit off of what was previously expected, we probably would never have adopted Einstein's theory of relativity, and our GPS's wouldn't work. It seems pretty unlikely that Einstein would have stumbled upon a theory that let to the creation of the GPS (as well as being strongly supported by a variety of experiences) if those observations of Mercury had been a fluke.

      Now, there ARE things about images from telescopes (both space telescopes and Earth based telescopes) that can be deceptive if you don't know what you're looking at. For instance, you should be skeptical of any image of a celestial body that's brightly coloured. It's common for these images to be false colour. Occasionally this is to make the images prettier, but it often actually has a purpose. Sometimes false colour is used for images that were taken using equipment that lets light through that's outside of the visible range, such as UV, IR, or x-ray images. For example, examine this image of Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Enceladusstripes_cassini.jpg The blue-green areas in the image aren't that colour in real life. The colour comes from data from UV and near-IR images. It still indicates something real, and it's still useful, but it's not what colour it really is. If an image of a celestial body from NASA is the correct colour, the notes on NASA's website usually say "true colour". If the colours are not correct, they say "false colour".

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  • The universe is a made up place. The only thing outside of earth is more people buzzing around, trying to find the meaning of life. Stars are just street lights, our sun is their daylight, the Moon is an illusion. Nothing is real.

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  • From far away it looks like white noise.

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  • That sounds like it would be cool as hell, too bad it probably wont ever happen :(

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  • Become an astronaut.
    I say worth it.

    Someone once asked (not sure here or somewhere else) where you'd like to be for you last few moments alive.
    Obviously the common answer would be with friends, family loved ones, yes yes all normal; but I'd like to be flying through one of the many beautiful nebulae in space.

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    • I probably should. Also, that would be a beautiful way to spend your last day.

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  • Google a picture of the Earth. that is the earth we live in

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  • Hike to the top of a high mountain during a new moon. Lay down on the ground at night and look up. Imagine you are already in space and all that surrounds you is nothingness and stars. It is truly amazing.

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    • That actually sounds absolutely surreal to me!

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      • It is so much fun! It makes you feel so insignificant and small, and very grateful for gravity. If you really get into it, it gives a sensation that is similar to the feeling you get when you walk over a glass floor hundreds of stories above the ground. Good times.

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