[ninty]

I just had a revelation! I was watching Jack Horkheimer (who is an awesome astronomer and is seen on PBS) and I suddenly realized how small and insignificant us as individuals are and us as a planet, solar system and galaxy are.

Take a look at the clip from a recent show:
http://www.miamisci.org:8080/ramgen/sta ... sehostname

I recommend watching the whole thing, becasue I think it's interesting, however some of you may not. But the part i'm talking about is at about 3 minutes and 15 seconds in when Jack talks about Antares and how large that one star is. You may say, yeah, well who cares...600 million miles wide. The kicker is this star is in our own galaxy. And its only one of 20 bright red stars like itself! That means there;s probably hundreds of stars just as large as it all around us. In addition to that, it is probably true that there are hundreds of other solar systems in this galaxy alone just like ours! We can't even see other planets outside of our galaxy because they have to reflect the light from stars to see them, and thats very difficult, but you can bet they are out there. And that is just in this galaxy. Think of how many galaxies there are. billions. trillions. Probably too many for a computer to count, and we can't even see past our own solar system.

It's incredible to me. I love going outise to look at stars and planets, and read about them. It truely puts things into perspective.

If you don't care, thats cool. Try not to dump on the thread. I'm open for a civil discussion.



http://www.jackstargazer.com/ has tons of videos if you want to go out and look for yourself one night. This week venus is going to pass over the sun. That hasn't happened in 122 years. You'll beable to see a black spot on the sun if you use the proper eye wear as venus passes between us and the sun. Very cool.

Another cool site that has a lot of answers. And a lot of answers that make you scratch your head. Kind of humbling:
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/questi ... number=166