Space thread

Its a moonless night right now, you can see the stars very clearly its awesome. Do you ever look at the milky way (the glowing line that crosses the sky at an angle) and realize that all the stars you see are part of this? Basically, the stars you see are like being in a broad, flat chocolate chip cookie cake; the stars ypu see are chocolate chips mainly above or below you of this big disc; when you look at the center of the cake (the center of the milky way) you only see a faint glow. Another interesting thing to realize is that the faint twinkle of stars (stars that are easily as bright as or much brighter than our sun) is dim because of how far they are away from us. So imagine that each star youre looking at is actually the sun, then imagine how far you actually must be from this star for its glow to be so faint.
Imagine what a wonder it would hsve been to have lived during a time in recorded history, when a supernova was bright enough to see in the sky during the day; take the visualization of the far away sun and imagine how powerful a supernova is.. Think of how bright this supernova must have been at night; brighter than a full moon; imagine the spectacle..

Also realize that "the observable universe" is 13 or so billion ly in radius, but the stars we see at the fringe of our observable universe can see stars another 13 billion ly farther away, and the stars seen at the edge of that horizon can see another 13 billion lys away, and so on.
The universe may be infinitely large.
Think of travelling in a spacecraft, and living forever. It may be the case that doing so, you would never reach an endpoint; you would keep going and going and never run out of stars or space... You could keep going forevet...

My favorite thing to think about is a subject that is often covered in courses on the universe;
Cosmic voids.
Basicslly the observable universe looks like a giant 3d spiderweb; there are some massive holes in it where there is nothing...
Some of the holes are billions of lys across; if you were on a spaceship, in the middle of one of them, turned off all the lights onboard, and looked out onto the sky you would see nothing, even with binoculars or a moderate telescope.
You would be in a level of darkness that redefines the word darkness.

To think that a place like this exists is mind blowing. A place so far from anything. Just imagine the lonelyness...