A Panorama Of Space

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I figured some of the locals here would appreciate this, spent some time trying to find nebulas among the great sheet of stars. Pretty cool to look at! :D

Wow. That photo is crazy epic. Seeing as how you can zoom all the way in and still get the clarity, then zoom all the way back out. Really makes you feel insignificant, yet significant all at the same time.

Whoa! Thanks for sharing. This is brilliant.

This stuff is pretty amazing. I like how I can zoom in to get a LOT more detail and clarity of all of the stars and things floating around in space.

Hopefully this will give people some perspective on just how big the universe is (and why people actually take the idea that there is life elsewhere out there so seriously.) According to the pic info, this is a picture of just a billion stars in the center of our galaxy (which I find a bit unbelievable, but I will take their word on it...) Our galaxy is said to have around 100 to 400 billion stars in it, so basically this picture multiplied by 100 to 400, and we have a fairly average sized galaxy. And then there are said to be around 100 billion to 200 billion galaxies in the universe. Just imagine looking at our one star and then zooming out to see a billion stars (like that in the pic) and zooming out more to see 100-400 of these billion. Then we zoom out even more to see a billion galaxies (again similar to the pic) all each containing billions of stars of their own, and then zooming out more to see 100 to 200 billion galaxies. Really, so big that it's basically impossible to conceptually imagine. Or if you want, imagine while looking at the image that you are looking at a billion galaxies, just a fraction of the number of galaxies in the universe, and in each one of these galaxies are hundreds times more stars than what you are looking at.

This makes me incredibly happy.

It's amazing how vast one single galaxy is, when it's only just a drop in the ocean of the universe.

Always enjoy this sort of stuff. Thanks Khar. :)

I actually used that picture a few weeks back to highlight a point.

"Open your email and click on the link"

"Buh... what's this?"

"Next time you want to know why I don't give a shit about trivial little problems like finance, look at that - therein lies your answer"

No comeback.