If you've never crushed coco-puffs in a plastic bag, one at a time with your fingers, you are missing out.

Andromeda

I took my first pictures of a galaxy last weekend. Galaxies are tough to find. Even in a six inch telescope they look like the faintest white fuzz, nowhere near as bright as a faint star. I do not have a polar aligning scope for my telescope yet so the photo is not as clear as it could be. The larger photo of Andromeda is a 45 second exposure of the galaxy looking through the telescope. The smaller photo of the Andromeda galaxy was my camera piggy backed on the telescope with a 300 second exposure. I hope to buy the polar aligning scope this Christmass...maybe sooner.

Warp & Weave is now accepting submissions

Art by Matt Page @ thisismattsart.blogspot.com, type face by Chris Peck

NGC 7331 and Beyond

This is the galazy NGC 7331. It is most often compared to our Milky Way galaxy because of it's apparent likeness -- Being a spiral galaxy and roughly the same size.

It is the beyond I want to focus on, though. This galaxy is about 30 million light years away from us. However, if you can see, just above NGC 7331 several distinct galaxies. They are roughly a tenth the size. This means that they are about 10 times further than NGC 7331 is from us. 300 million ly away!! Now, look at the little dots. Every dot is a galaxy. Some are even 100th the size of 7331. That's 3 billion light years away!!

It is so unbelievable how vast this universe is!!