Recently NASA posted this image of the Andromeda galaxy, which has twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way contains more solar systems like ours than I can honestly wrap my pitiful little mind around. And within these solar systems are planets that are to us, more immense than anything we can comprehend. Andromeda, named for a princess in Greek mythology was chained to a rock to be eaten by the cracken (a sea monster) as punishment for her mother, Cassiopia's bragging about her beauty. If you are familiar with Greek mythology you know that she was later rescued by Perseus... or if you are like me and love "Clash of the Titans" (the original version, with all its cheesy special effects and not the new 300 style version which I plan on boycotting) then you also are familiar with this tale.
The Andromeda galaxy is our closest large galaxy neighbor at only a mere 2.5 million light years from our sun. How many solar systems does the Andromeda galaxy have, I wonder? Again, way too many for me to wrap my pitiful mind around. Our earth is big enough as it is, but then when I try to comprehend how vast and large the universe actually is, my mind travels in circles and I feel overwhelmed just trying to understand it. I gaze up into the cloudy sky and know that beyond those clouds today lies our atmosphere and beyond that billions and trillions and possibly an infinite amount of stars and galaxies, planets, solar systems, black holes, worm holes, dark matter, quasars, and a plethora of other things that I may try to understand but probably never will in my life time.
It is just so awe inspiring to me to realize how tiny we really are. It is so awe inspiring to see how beautiful the Andromeda galaxy really is. I'd like to visit it and see if maybe there is a planet with little pink puff balls running around or some other odd creatures seen only in our science fiction movies.
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