Hacker News Reader

Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

Just incredible. The moment when you realize that what you thought was CCD noise is stars...

So true :). Here's an equally amazing zoomable picture of the Milky Way: http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1242a/zoomable/

Zoomed to max and my mind was blown. What immediately came to my head was: imagine if each of those shiny points in this cloud is an atom. Our whole civilization is nothing more than a surface irregularity on one of "electrons" orbiting one of those dots. Both drives home the sense of scale, and lets one marvel at the recursivity of patterns at different scales in the universe.

This stuff gives me an unreasonable fear of getting lost. If you had some magical hyperdrive ship and bumped the controls with your elbow at the wrong moment, you'd never find your way back home.

Just take a pulsar map, like the one on the voyager golden records.

That happens frequently to people in Pohl's Heechee Saga.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heechee

This is impressive!

Edit: We really can't be alone in this universe.

I wouldn't believe you if I didn't see this same thing in my backyard. When I point my telescope (a good ole dob 10' light bucket) into the sky on a dark night when the milky way is near zenith, it looks like someone has frozen a single frame of white noise on an old crt tv set but with hints of color.

What's even more amazing is that we only see the stars hot enough to be visible. There is a HUGE amount of stars not detectible woven into that galactic fabric hiding from us.

We are small.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com