Re: OT: A dose of perspective ...

Norman Draper wrote:
On Feb 10, 7:40 pm, Paul L <kbtr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
.... from the "Astronomy Picture of the Day" site.

It's almost too much sometimes.

cheers

Paul

This one??

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

The galaxies in this picture are of absolutely incomprehensible (well,
for me at least) size. Our own Milky Way Galaxy is 100,000 light
years in diameter.... it's one of BILLIONS (thank you, Mr. Sagan!) of
these things. On the clearest night we can see only a tiny fraction
of the stars in our own galaxy. We can't see a single thing outside
of it.

Oh yes we can! - I've seen the Andromeda galaxy plenty of times, and the Magellanic clouds are visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere. Thanks for the post though, I like comprehensible comparisons like that. Another one I heard was a speaker showing us a two kilo (er, four and a half pound) bag of rice and saying that to get the number of grains of rice equivalent to stars in our galaxy, all twenty people in the room would have to count ten bags a day for the next thirty years.


Think about this: if the sun were the size of a grain of salt, the
orbit of the earth would fit in your cupped hands, the solar system
would fit within a circle made by your arms, and....... the next star
in the sky would be five miles away.

As one of my favourite party pieces (hey wow - guitar content!) says:

Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown,
And things seem hard or tough,
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
And you feel that you've had quite eno-o-o-o-o-ough...

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the "Milky Way".

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

(The Universe Song by Eric Idle, from The Meaning of Life. I like to pair it with Tom Lehrer's Elements song. My wife's cousin says I inspired her to study science by singing those two!)

- guy




But this is all about us, it's all here for our benefit.....

Right.


Norman (Amazing Stuff) Draper
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: OT: A dose of perspective ...
    ... The galaxies in this picture are of absolutely incomprehensible (well, ... Our own Milky Way Galaxy is 100,000 light ... of the stars in our own galaxy. ... And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour, ...
    (rec.music.makers.guitar.acoustic)
  • Re: XX days until what?
    ... There is indeed a large amount of space between the stars of our Galaxy. ... Then on the same scale, the nearest star system--Alpha Centauri-- would lie 400 miles away, and the disk of our Milky Way Galaxy would be 12 million ... If you shrank the Milky Way's disk to the size of a quater, then the nearest galaxy would be just an INCH away, and the entire observable universe-- which contains many billions of galaxies-- would be only three miles across. ...
    (sci.astro.amateur)
  • Re: OT: A dose of perspective ...
    ... Norman Draper wrote: ... Our own Milky Way Galaxy is 100,000 light ... of the stars in our own galaxy. ... orbit of the earth would fit in your cupped hands, ...
    (rec.music.makers.guitar.acoustic)
  • Re: OT: A dose of perspective ...
    ... of the stars in our own galaxy. ... in the sky would be five miles away. ...
    (rec.music.makers.guitar.acoustic)
  • Daily # 3986
    ... principal axes and one intermediate axis of each galaxy. ... occur- the first comparative study of globular clusters and their ... recently failed to detect the signature of RGB stars. ... direct determination of the distance to 1 Mpc accuracy using Cepheids. ...
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