Don’t forget to look up!
When was the last time you saw the view out of the window?
Posted 29 Sep 2007, lunch time.
Tagged with astronomy, earth, science, space.
It struck me the other day just how few people take the time to look into the sky. When was the last time you cast your gaze upwards and observed the collection of galaxies, stars, planets, comets, satellites and other objects that are visible from Earth with the naked eye?
Do you realise exactly where you are and what's happening at this very moment?
You are standing on a ball of rock, spinning at about 1,000 miles per hour, travelling around an even larger ball of hot plasma (containing 750 times the mass of all its orbiting planets) at 67,000 miles per hour.
Earth, Sun and the haphazard collection of planets and assorted debris that accompany them are travelling through our tiny galaxy, the Milky Way, at 490,000 miles per hour, taking a mere 225 million years to complete one lap.
The Milky Way - itself just one of hundreds of billions of similar galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars - is travelling through the universe at 1.3 million miles per hour.
You're missing one hell of a view shooting past the window above your head.
To quote Robert Evans:
There's something satisfying, I think, about the idea of light travelling for millions of years through space and just at the right moment as it reaches Earth someone looks at the right bit of sky and sees it. It just seems right that an event of that magnitude should be witnessed.
