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I was looking at a Hubble shot of the Orion Nebula and the scale blew my mind
I was reading an article on the NASA site about the Hubble Space Telescope's view of the Orion Nebula. It said the cloud is about 24 light-years across, which means light takes 24 years just to go from one side to the other. That's a distance my brain can't even picture. Has anyone else seen a space photo where the size of things just didn't seem real?
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angela_patel757mo ago
Honestly, the scale stuff never gets me like the details do. I saw a close-up of the Pillars of Creation and all I could think about was how every single one of those little dust specks is probably a whole solar system. That’s what feels impossible.
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quinncoleman6mo ago
What gets me is zooming in on one of those specks. That whole solar system has planets, and maybe on one of those planets, there's a rock. And on that rock, someone could be looking up at their own sky, feeling just as small. It's all just layers of the same impossible thing.
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miasanchez7mo ago
Yeah, that "every single dust speck" idea is what did it for me too. I try to picture our whole planet as one of those specks and it just short-circuits my brain. It makes the big distances feel a bit more real somehow.
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