Well, let me teach you how to reason something like this.
A 1 second Google search reveals that astronomers estimate that the milky way is 100,000 light years across.
2 minutes on Wikipedia will tell you that camera lenses with a field of view greater than 90 degrees are difficult to engineer in the modern day, so we can guess that the camera used to take the photograph has a 90 degree field of view at maximum (especially because we know it would have taken a really long time for the camera to get that far away).
We can solve this problem with elementary trigonometry.
(50,000 ly) / tan(45 deg) = 50,000 ly.
The camera must be 50,000 light years away.
Our current understanding is that matter cannot travel faster than c, the speed of light in a vacuum. If we built a probe to travel at the speed of light, we would have needed to launch the probe 50,000 years before it took a photo. Furthermore, information cannot travel faster than c either which means that it would have been 50,000 years before we got the photo.
That means we would have needed to launch the probe 100,000 years ago.
Originally Posted by FastGamerr
