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I was looking at a photo of the Horsehead Nebula and the scale just blew my mind
I was reading an article on the NASA website about the James Webb Space Telescope's new images. It said the dark part of the Horsehead Nebula, that iconic horse head shape, is about three light-years tall. I had to stop and think about that. A light-year is the distance light travels in a whole year, which is almost six trillion miles. So that dark cloud is roughly eighteen trillion miles from top to bottom. It's just a speck in a photo on my phone screen, but the real thing is an almost unthinkable amount of empty space and dust. It really hit me how these amazing pictures are showing us things so big and so far away that our brains can't really get it. Has anyone else had a moment like that with a space photo, where the numbers just didn't seem real?
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the_ruby10d ago
Ever feel like @hayden709, then you try to picture walking across that dust cloud and your brain just breaks? It's like trying to imagine a number that doesn't even mean anything anymore.
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benc5320d ago
Yeah, those numbers are just silly. My brain tries to picture it and just gives up, like trying to imagine a trillion of anything. It's a beautiful photo of what is basically a giant, space-sized dust bunny.
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