Daknjak

I didn't see a good niche for this post, so i decided where better than general discussion. Let me start by saying, I am fascinated with Astronomy. If you ever had the chance to look up and see the stars, and I mean to be far away from the city, and to see how beautiful they are. (If you can't spot the milkyway, you don't know what i mean.) All those little dots filling the sky. Each one a MASSIVE ball of burning gas. Some even have planets around them! even the spaces between the stars are filled with countless galaxies. It is hard to get all this out without babbling away about what goes on out there. To realize just how very tiny we are. Here is a link to a picture taken by the Voyager spacecraft of Earth at about 4 billion miles away. http://www.planetary.org/html/news/a...s/earthpbd.jpg

Imagine you somewhere on that little dot reading this at your home or work. Think about all the people this world is made up of, and how we can so easily hate eachother. How we sometimes feel "better" than, or "bigger" than someone else. Look closely at that picture and imagine what someone that far away would think. "Just another star." I don't know about you guys, but maybe when you think of the BIG picture, our petty differences don't really add up to more than one "pale blue dot."
Something to think about.

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Suave

A very poetic outlook, but unfortunately I'm a die-hard pragmatist. The bigger picture as you describe it doesn't apply to our situation at the moment. It's a very enjoyable way to look at things though, and I applaud everyone who takes that attitude.

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meembo

I'm all for the poetic outlook. I was just on a long vacation to the midwest of the United States (South Dakota, mostly), and by far my favorite feature of the midwest (of the US) is the sky, and its size, and its beauty, and its very powerful way of relegating a human to a small perspective in the big, big world. I can relate to daknjak easily. I live most of the time in urban Connecticut, where stars are hard to see because of air pollution and light pollution. I very much enjoyed seeing the Milky Way every evening while on vacation, and I have held on tightly to the perspective it gave to me.

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Elphaba

Daknjak, I live in a very rural area so I know exactly what you mean by the majesty of the night sky. We slept outside recently just so we could star gaze before falling asleep. How small we are in the entire universe doesn't seem to change our petty reasons to "hate" either as individuals or as countries. Perhaps we should wish upon a star?

Thanks for the great link.

tecoyah

Look to the skys this month....and you will see a red orb after midnight.


You are seeing Mars closer than anyone has in over 50,000 years.

think about it.....

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ngdawg

I remember seeing Mars in the Missouri August sky 2 years ago and I couldn't take my eyes off it.
A year and a half ago, middle of November, there was to be a meteor shower at 4:30 am. I didn't give it a thought and went to bed, but at 4:25 I woke up suddenly, realized it was time, grabbed my coat and stood outside and watched(spouse rolled over, saw I was gone and cursed the computer thinking I was still on it LOL)
The meteor shower was amazing!!! Lunar eclipses, comets, it all holds me spellbound and just makes me realize how insignificant in the grand scheme of things I really am. That's a good thing, though...it puts all the day to day BS in true perspective and gives me more appreciation of the things in life we sometimes take for granted.

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emmdubbs

to quote yakko warner (because i am a warner) "it's a great big universe and we're all really puny, we're just tiny little specs about the size of mac-a-roonie"

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ObieX

Probably my most favorite of all space pictures so far is this one:
http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2...s/full_jpg.jpg

That is from the Hubble deep field. What you're looking at are thousands of galaxies in a section of the sky about a square centimeter or two in size....

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Jimellow

Neat picture! It looks like a really zoomed in image of a decorated Christmas tree.

In that dimension in relation to the human eye looking skyward? And when zooming in, more is revealed (including a much larger area)?

That comment kind of blew my mind temporarily, and I want to make sure I am at least partially understanding the dimensions.

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ObieX

Yep, look up, snip out a couple square centimeters and thats what you get when you zoom in. That picture alone could stand as reason to believet hat there is life out there other than that on this planet. Infinity in a speck of sky. All those galaxies, each filled with millions/billions of stars, an unimaginable number of worlds.. in a dot.

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Daknjak

The universe being what it is, It blows my mind knowing that those stars we see, or the pictures we get from our various telescopes shows us things from millions of years past as the light from those stars can take that long just to get to us. Astronomy is the only way to a true time machine. And don't get me started on the big bang. My puny brain has trouble comprehending all of "everything" as a small dot exploding out to make the universe as it is now...still exploding apart. They even say that it is slowing down, and might someday come back together, and this big bang might not have been the only one. It might have been going on for countless times before. To think of that small dot, and having to look at it as that being the universe. That dot didn't explode into space that was already there...space itself stretched with it. So then you have to ask yourself, what was beyond the space? In all normal scientific terms...nothing was. I can't comprehend nothing. See how I babble when I get going on this?

__________________
On a Mens room ceiling: "Why are you looking up here? The joke is in your hand."

"He who laughs last thinks slowest."

Daknjak

By the way, here is my favorite hubble picture.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ima...18_hst_big.jpg

I have heard it called the eye of God. One can almost believe that there he is looking in on us through some small hole in space.

I think it would be great if we posted our favorite space pics.

__________________
On a Mens room ceiling: "Why are you looking up here? The joke is in your hand."

"He who laughs last thinks slowest."

BadNick

I've sort of been in love with astronomy since I was about 5yo when I got my first book with cool astronomical pictures, and then I got my first telescope as a present when I was about 7yo; later my interests expanded into cosmology, too, at the amateur level anyway. The universe is just amazing ...more locally our own little world is equally amazing.

Some of my favorite pics involve colliding galaxies. Here's a cool one:

Mr A

Since we are on topic, the next meteor shower is on August 12. http://stardate.org/nightsky/meteors/

splck

I've always liked that picture too. Here's a bit of info on it .Hubble ultra deep field


Star watching, planet spotting, meteors, northern lights, even the odd satellite...it's all good.

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