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Something to keep you awake at night!

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Harold

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We landed a large "foot stool" with associated tech stuff on Mars last week----Mars is 11 minutes away at the speed of light (186, 000 miles a second)--
When our tech nerds send a command (turn the camera 90 degrees,
to the right--for instance)--It takes 22 minutes to get a response--(11 minutes out---11 minutes back)--
In our Solar System--From the Sun--Venus is 6 Light Minutes away--Earth is 8.3 LM--Mars is 12.7 LM--Jupiter is 43 LM--Saturn is 1.3 LIGHT YEARS--
(Now we are getting into some real apace numbers!)--Uranus is 2.7 Light Years--Neptune is 4.3 Light Years----
Pluto was downgraded a few yeas ago (didn't make the cut)--just a bunch of rock flying around around in orbit!

Our Solar System (Sun and planets) are part of a Spiral Galaxy--and we are sort of on the edge--The Milky Way really brings this out.
The RADIUS of our Spiral Galaxy (where we live), is
52,850 LIGHT YEARs! containing 100-400 billion stars! plus a few wondering stars that fall into our gravity! With the advance of telescope
technology and spectrum analysis--the science nerds believe there are several billion Galaxies in the Universe--But that is kind of
meaningless--since it is also thought that space is endless!--The Galaxies go on forever no beginning--no ending!
Using round numbers--Science nerds figure that if one in a million stars have planets orbiting around it, and one in
a million of
those planets have some sort of atmosphere which could support ANY kind of life (microbes--whatever)--
There would still be millions, if not billions of planets out there with some kind of life! So you think we are alone!

Sleep tight tonight! an Happy Dreams!
 
Speaking of the Milky way, I can't wait for the core to get up above the horizon at an hour when I can get out and take more pictures! Here's one I took in 2019 of the MW core just above Cabezon peak.

Cabazon-web.jpg
 
I've often tried to convey the size of our solar system to others. They think the "charts" in books 'n such are to scale... feh. 100 LIGHT YEARS in diameter for just our galaxy alone. And the nearest galaxy to ours, Andromeda, is Waaay th' far out there. Yet we'll have to brace for impact (just not very soon)!

When talking Spacetime, the numbers are mind numbing.
 
"Minor" correction to above: Saturn is a bit more than a light HOUR away from Earth (depending on yearly cycle or position around the sun). The outer planets are light HOURS away from earth (not light-years). :smile: Alpha Centuri is about 4 light-years away. Andromeda is about 2.5 million light years away (and rapidly approaching collision with our the Milky Way - brace for impact in maybe 10 billion years!)... now THAT is distance.

My epiphany with astronomy came when I realized that nearly all the stars you can see with your naked eye are just local ones in our spiral arm.
 
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That about sums it up, Mark.

Then there's particle physics...

"ODE TO A QUARK"

Blue quark, blue quark in my wall,
down there in the stuff so small.
Are you really there at all,
Strange Blue Up Quark, in my wall.
 
Thanks for the corrections--even these "miinor" corrections do not alter the fact that these planets are really far away--
I was using my old high school astronomy book for these distances--
 
Yep... big distances in the ol' expanse. Still amazes me that you can't see the vast bulk of stars in our own galaxy, including the center (due to dust). It was a real shock when Hubble observed that some of the super distant stars he saw with the Palomar telescope turned out to be GALAXIES... and there is likely very few stars between them. Of course Andromeda is huge because it is so close (same for the Large Magellanic Cloud in the southern hemisphere), but all the rest really can't be otherwise seen with the naked eye. Now there are gigantic maps of most of the galaxies... with distances that are virtually impossible to imagine.
 
This is great!
The distance to the moon was easy to appreciate in ham radio world. There were buddies I knew that used to do what was called "moon bounce"... sending a tone to the moon and it came back in about 2.5 seconds.
Anyway, incredible that even Voyage 1 won't get beyond the Oort Cloud 30,000 years!
The best part of this video shows the small sphere of all radio data that has been moving away (at about 5 minutes into the video).
But that Laniakea Supercluster is just, well, impossible to relate to (and it goes on and on from there)!
 
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And there are those relative size of stars videos, which are fun too. Our sun is small.
 
rover.jpg
 
At one time I thought the Solar System was in a bell jar on someone's fireplace mantel. How small is that. If a microscope can see a Virus and a telescope can see back in time. Then why can't people see where their driving. Small minds I guess. Madflyer
 
Boink said:
Yep... big distances in the ol' expanse. Still amazes me that you can't see the vast bulk of stars in our own galaxy, including the center (due to dust). It was a real shock when Hubble observed that some of the super distant stars he saw with the Palomar telescope turned out to be GALAXIES... and there is likely very few stars between them. Of course Andromeda is huge because it is so close (same for the Large Magellanic Cloud in the southern hemisphere), but all the rest really can't be otherwise seen with the naked eye. Now there are gigantic maps of most of the galaxies... with distances that are virtually impossible to imagine.
Click to expand...
The 200" Hale telescope mirror at Palomar was made in 1934-35 in Corning N.Y., not far from me. It's PYREX. It took them 2 tries to get it right. the first one had problems with the mold collapsing. it is still on display at the Corning Museum Of Glass. It took a year to cool and anneal. At the time the largest existing telescope mirror was 100" It is still the largest single piece of glass ever made. It was shipped on a special made train car.
This is the damaged blank at the museum.
corning telescope lense.jpg
 
That bad Palomar blank, sure puts my measly 10" reflector to shame.
That's a great looking antique refractor in front of the disk.
 
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A pal had a Questar with a Nikon adapter, we would nitrogen "soak" Ektachrome and he would go to the center of the state for his photos. He gave me a poster-sized exposure of the Horsehead Nebula that i really spectacular... until you see the image the Hubble sent home.
 
JOURNALIST: No one would have believed, in the last years of the
nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds
of space.

No one could have dreamed we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope
studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered
the possibility of life on other planets and yet, across the gulf of space, minds
immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and
surely, they drew their plans against us.

And we just landed a messenger on the host planet..........
 
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