OK, so a college friend of mine is actually in the astronomy business, and after all the evenings we'd spent discussing the finer points of astrophysics over many a few pints of Old Peculier, I thought I was a hardened man, immune to all this stuff. Immune to all the kind of Saganist gawping at the sky, the microscopic-dot-lost-in-an-infinite-void stuff. I thought I was, in Terry Pratchett's word, cosmospolitan.

And then this appeared on Slashdot. And I clicked on the links, and it's full of stars. It's full of stars from M frickin' 31. I'm sitting here looking at a clear visible-light image of tens of thousands of distinguishable individual main-sequence stars in the Andromeda galaxy. And suddenly I'm gawping. The constellations of someone else's galaxy! All those worlds...! I'm just in awe that humankind can make this image, even with three and a half days of Hubble time.

It is very cold, there are strange stars near Arcturus, Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky...

When I was a kid, the next galaxy seemed so far away...

Peter

I gotta agree with you there. Some of the hubble images show a tiny "speck" of space, so small that it would be the size of a pinpoint to the naked eye, and yet that pinpoint of space is chock full of entire galaxies. It's mind-boggling.

This is still one of my favorite websites. (I'm pretty sure this link has been posted here before)

tanstaafl.

Those are some amazing photos. I get that same sense of awe from some of the amazing stuff right here on our planet.

One of my favorites is the USGS Earth As Art.

Jim