So, for today’s science “blog-of-the-day” I am going to post a few pictures that I have found on the internet (all were acquired and can be located from NASA’s Hubble Telescope website http://hubble.nasa.gov/).

Also, for those of you who are interested in how some of Hubbles pictures are taken, and for what purpose, and if you only watch one video this year I highly suggest, recommend you watch this 4 minute clip. It talks about Hubble, and risks taken, and what all it has shown us.

For those of you who don’t feel like watching it, allow me to at least quote this one line, “There are over 100 billion galaxies in the universe. Simply saying that number doesn’t really mean much to us, because it doesn’t really provide any context. Our brains have no way to put that in any meaningful perspective. . .We pointed the most powerful telescope made by human beings at absolutely nothing, for no other reason than because we were curious; and discovered that we occupy a very tiny part in the heavens.”

This quote did really mean a lot, and when you think about the number 100,000,000,000; nothing we know of comes close to that number! One hundred billion, the richest man in the world is only worth half of that. There is 20x more galaxies then humans on this plant. And with this we are talking galaxies alone! each galaxy has billions, if not trillions of stars, planets, and unknown meaning. in a size no bigger then a grain of sand, there is are hundreds of millions of galaxies just behind it.

Just putting those numbers into perspective, may be impossible, but putting the actual size of each galaxy into perspective is just beyond the power of one mind. A picture or a graphic may show a lot of galaxies, most of which appear to be small, cool looking things, but in reality, they are trillions of miles long, hundreds of light years wide, and millions of light years away.