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This messes with my head.

I took my son camping a few weeks ago and when everyone else had gone to bed, two of my friends and I stayed up and watched the milky way.

We played “Spot the shooting star.”

We’ve all done it… stared at the night sky in amazement but I wonder if we do it enough. Perhaps we miss out by not connecting with that wonder and mystery more often.

Anyway, whilst most of us are more concerned with paying the mortgage and the rest of the practicalities of life, the universe is there, doing its thing, on a scale that defies imagination and belief.

The picture above is not actually our galaxy — the milky way. There are no such photos of our own galaxy because you’d have to get a camera thousands of light years away to take the picture. But it’s a “spiral” galaxy like our own and if we did have the picture, it would look very similar to the one above.

To get across our galaxy would take about 150,000 light years. So if you started at one end and went at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) it would only take 150,000 years to get to the other side!

In our galaxy — the milky way, there are around 500, 000, 000, 000 stars or 500 BILLION.

Each star is like our Sun. Mind boggling enough but it’s a drop in the ocean.

The are BILLIONS of galaxies each with BILLIONS of stars.

When scientists pointed the hubble telescope into a random tiny bit of dark space and took a picture, the result was so amazing it’s been called “The most important picture ever to be taken” (see video below).

Thousands of galaxies appeared so clearly on that image.

No one knows how big the universe is because we only know about “the observable” universe — what we can see with our gizmos and gadgets — like hubble.

If all this wasn’t mind-boggling enough, science reports strange and mysterious things in the universe that they don’t understand, like “Only 5% of the universe is made of matter scientists understand. A further 25% is so-called “dark matter”, which clusters around galaxies, and the remaining 70% is even more enigmatic “dark energy”, which drives the expansion of the universe.”

So why am I telling you all this? Well, if you’re like me you’ll take comfort in knowing that “me and my problems” aren’t important in the grand scheme. They’re important to me of course but it’s also good to know that there is a much bigger picture — bigger than we can imagine or comprehend at this point in time.

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Mike Kinnaird
Habit Guide: How to be Happy & Healthy