Ciel Austral is a team of five very enthusiastic amateur French astronomers, Jean Claude Canonne, Philippe Bernhard, Didier Chaplain, Nicolas Outters, and Laurent Bourgon, who own and operate their own telescope in northern Chile. The 14400×14200 image was stitched together from nearly 4,000 separate images that required 1,060 hours (6.3 weeks) of exposures shot from July 2017 to January 2019. It took two computers eight days to stitch together the photos, and a further two months to process the 620 gigabytes of data. If you could warp yourself to the Magellanic Cloud, it wouldn't look like the dreamy, painterly image pictured above. Much of the image is made up of false colors that show the different elements present in the image. Different colors represent hydrogen, sulfur and oxygen III, emphasizing the cloud-like high-density gas nebulae in a way that a standard visible light image can't. The image shows the birth and death of stars and the aftermath, including supernovae
In today's pop culture, machines with artificial general intelligence (AGI) are typically portrayed as walking, talking human analogs replete with personalities -- from the Terminator's murderous intent to Vision's noble heroism. In reality, self-aware robots are a long way off. Nathan Michael, associate research professor and the director of the Resilient Intelligent Systems Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, argues that generalized AI systems will grow out from today's single-purpose "narrow" AIs. "General AI is representative of this concept of bringing together many different kinds of specialized AI," he explained. AGI isn't so much a singular standalone system -- it's no digital Athena bursting forth from Zeus' forehead -- but rather a threshold of capability derived from a collection of narrow AI's working together, Michael said. He likens it to a baby. When a person is born, they don't possess a proper consciousness or se