Traveller's Guides To The Universe

I found a few links that might be handy when we all can explore space:

1. The Atlas of the Universe. Don't forget to look at the whole map.
2. What we can expect to see outside the window when we travel very fast: What would a relativistic interstellar traveller see?
3. Also, can we see the Lorentz-Fitzgeral contraction when we travel very fast?

To have some ideas about how big the universe is, think about this: In one second, light can travel the distance equivalent to about 7 times the Earth circumference. It takes light about 8 minutes to travel fromt the Sun to Earth. It takes light about 4 years to reach the nearest star outside the solar system. And it takes more than 10,000,000,000 years for light emitted by the farthest objects we can observe to reach Earth.

So, my plan is to live long enough to upload my brain state to cyborgs, wait till we have a warp drive, and explore the universe! :-D

Or maybe I will stay on Earth and watch Discovery Channel.

M81

Here is a beautiful description of what the M81 galaxy meant to an astronomer when he looked at it.

High resolution pictures and more info about M81 can be found here.

If you are not sure what a galaxy is, you should really check this Wikipedia article.

Billions and billions (and billions...) of galaxies, each with billions and billions (and billions...) of stars. Our Sun is just one of these stars. All life on Earth's surface derive their energy input from the Sun.

By the way, M81 is considered quite close to us at about 12 million light-years away. Now, to put that distance in perspective, it took light 12 million years to travel from M81 to Earth. Meanwhile, the speed of light is so great (to us) that light can travel around the Earth 7 times in one second. (Light travels about 300,000 kilometers per second, or about a billion kilometers per hour.)

We live in a really big universe.