When the Hubble telescope took pictures of the deep field of space, did it photograph the actual galaxies, or just the light that took light years to reach it's lenses?
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Mrs.Dufresne rediscovers Alana Davis
ANSWERS: 4
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Well, both. It wasn't a real-time photograph of those galaxies. But its still a photo, and its still light being captured by the lenses.
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It photographs the actual galaxies as they appeared when the light left them, possibly billions of years ago. They are still accurate images. Likewise, if I take a picture of you with my camera, it will record an image of you as you appeared a few nanoseconds ago, since light takes time to cover any distance to the camera.
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When you see or photograph anything it is "just the light" that reaches the eye/camera. That almost defines "seeing" and "photograph" - detecting light from some source. In one sense you can not see actual objects at all, you are just seeing effects of the light they emit or reflect.
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It's a photo of the actual galaxies, but from how many ever years ago :) All you are EVER detecting, eyes, camera, etc are the photons that are from/bounced off the object, there's no way you could 'actually photo' an object, other than detecting it's photons. And, when we look at space, the distances are so vast that the image we are recieving is up to billions of years old Hence why we can see galaxies in the early stages of formation, etc
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