starry starry night
Beyond the individual stars, we can see entire galaxies with the naked eye. It had never occurred to me that we can only detect the hot core, and that the whole structure is really a much bigger part of the night sky than we think.
This image juxtaposes the actual angle of subtention of the Great Spiral Galazy in Andromeda with our familiar moon.
Wind up the sensitivity of our retinas by a couple of trillion times, and the night sky would be full of glowing spirals.
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It is worth clicking on the image to find the original, and then clicking twice more to see the ultra-large version.
January 9th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
Andromeda has a double core, which, I heard recently, was formed by two galaxies colliding. First time I saw it was through 10×50 binos, when I was about 12 or 14. I think A for Andromeda was broadcast as a radio play about the same time. Wrong, it was the debut of Julie Christie, it was tv, it was the BBC, it was 1961, and we would have seen it some time later.