
I’ve talked about the Andromeda Galaxy recently, but I will do so again with no apologies because I’m on a kick.
A fact I didn’t know until this year is that, apart from the Milky Way, there are 7 other galaxies visible to the naked eye in our night sky in the right conditions.
Here’s what the Andromeda Galaxy might look like with the naked eye in a very dark place.

My eyes have seen many things. A man urinating on the sidewalk in Chicago; a burnt piece of toast; a toenail under a church pew. I feel I’ve been robbed to not know until just now that I could use those same eyes to see a galaxy of a trillion stars hovering in the midnight like an accidental paint smear.
Check out this image the Hubble telescope captured.

Zoom around on the full resolution here (better on a computer).
Someone made a video on YouTube panning around the image, and watching it will threaten to crush your soul.
Comments under the video I appreciate:
Imagine someone in Andromeda is watching “Gigapixels of Milkyway [4K]”
Then I remind myself that the distance between any 2 of those points of lights needs to be measured in LIGHT YEARS!
I don’t know which is more terrifying to grasp: (1) the number of stars or (2) the volume empty space surrounding them.
There’s probably some huge galactic war we have no clue about
In 2021, NASA will be launching Hubble telescope’s big brother, James Webb Space Telescope. What will it reveal?
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What does this mean for us? Why does it make my soul tremble with awe? Some see the image and wonder how people could ever doubt God’s existence. Others look and wonder why God would make so much just to impress a tiny species on a nearly invisible speck of dust called earth and then remain hidden (or allow that impression) when they suffer.
Whatever the truth is, it’s absolutely spellbinding.