How big is Big??

I loved showing this photo to my students, 8th graders. I made the room dark as possible and let them look at it. And then I would proceed to question what they were seeing. Most would quickly respond "stars". But to explain to them that they were looking at galaxies, lots of them, some became quite awed.

When we look up at the stars we are looking at suns, billions of them, some bigger some smaller, but really what we see is a portion of our galaxy. And when you have a clear dark night away from the city and you see the Mily Way and realize we are not just looking at the stars, but we are in fact, looking into the eye of our origins. A face to face meeting with awareness of our smallness and insignificance, or significance depending how you view it.

And to make things weirder, looking up into the speckled cloak of night is a look back into time. It took the light millions years to travel across space and enter my eye so that I might have this realization. Wow. So if the nearest star to us went into supernova (which I'm not sure it can, don't think it is big enough -Alfa Centurai will have to check this??) we wouldn't even know for over FOUR YEARS!! Thats the closest one!! It is quite wonderous to look up to the stars and find constellations and planets. But it is another thing to come to revelations about what you are actually looking at. It is a weirdly sublime sensation.

Back to the photo. We are not just a speck on the photo, we are a speck of a speck. A billionth of a speck. And how many galaxies can we see in the picture? And how many more are there? You get a similar type of cosmic feeling looking at this . And you can, maybe not comprehend, but get an idea of the vastness that is vast. We don't have words that can describe phenomena like this. Infinity. If we could zoom out, where would we end? And when would we stop zooming in?

So this leads me in a Drake way, I suppose, to wonder where they are . We are here. In an arm in the Milky Way. A medium sized star, third planet out. We call it Earth. Where are you?