[ETL]

“Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. ..."

For example, one light year, the *distance* light travels in a year at its constant speed of 186,000 miles per second, works out to about 6 TRILLION miles. And there are galaxies BILLIONS of light years away. This one supposedly is at 13.2 billion light years.

[dragnet2]

I don't have any old car pics, but I shot the M-51 Whirlpool Galaxy from my backyard not long ago.

M-51 is about 37 million light years from earth.

M51 Whirlpool Galaxy is located in the Constellation Canes Venatici. Its companion galaxy, seen above the main spiral galaxy is NGC 5195, which is a spectacular example of interacting galaxies.

In this case NGC 5195 is being "ripped apart" by the huge gravitational disturbance of M51.

The distance of M51 is estimated to be about 37 million light years. The diameter is about 100,000 light years and the total mass is estimated to be the equivalent of 160 billion suns. The diameter is similar to our own Milky Way Galaxy.

I find galaxies to be fascinating.

Canon 40D/10"SMT/ Series of 35x120 second raw format exposures W/8 darks, @ISO 800/--A 6.3Focal reducer was used in the optical train with CLS-LP filters/calibrated, aligned and stacked w/DSS.

Bringing out the data in this image was not easy and I experienced some issues during processing.