On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 12:25 PM, Seth Jarvis wrote:
I struggle to get my head around the 1,500 LY distance to the Horsehead, then try to imagine that distance relative to the overall size of our galaxy, and then try to visualize that against the distances between us and those galaxies appearing in the background. To borrow a phrase from Mr. Gumby, "My brain hurts!"
Indeed. Doing just some rough calculations of scale, if the haze of the Horsehead nebula were on your front window that you were looking through across the room at just 10 feet away (e.g., 1500 LY = 10 feet), a far-distant star in the photo (say 50,000 light years) would be up the street half a block away. The very nearby Andromeda Galaxy (2.5 million light years) would by across town 3 miles. Some of the background galaxies in the photo, if even a very conservative few billion light years distant, would be across the continent about 2500 miles distant. The most distant galaxies discovered would be 17,000 miles away from the Horsehead nebula on your window across the room. Jared