Supernova Remnant Cassiopeia A............

 

Enlargeable photo and description may be found here.  I love the confidence they project in describing what we are looking at.

Here's what...............................

 

.....................................ten million stars looks like.

The wisdom of Calvin..............

 

via

this admirable order...............

 

In the heavens, therefore, there is nothing fortuitous, unadvised, inconstant, or variable:  all there is order, truth, reason, and constancy; and all the things which are destitute of these qualities are counterfeit, deceitful, and erroneous, and have their residence about the earth beneath the moon, the lowest of all the planets.  He, therefore, who believes that this admirable order and almost incredible regularity of the heavenly bodies, by which the preservation and entire safety of all things is secure, is destitute of intelligence, must be considered to be himself wholly destitute of all intellect whatever.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero's Tusculan Disputations

Lord willing, we will do this..........

 

Counting the shooting stars in the night sky above the Mogollon Rim in Arizona.

-Michael Wade

image via

The James Webb Space Telescope..........

 ....................goes spiral galaxy watching:

I still say they are just guessing............

 Explanation: Massive stars in our Milky Way Galaxy live spectacular lives. Collapsing from vast cosmic clouds, their nuclear furnaces ignite and create heavy elements in their cores. After only a few million years for the most massive stars, the enriched material is blasted back into interstellar space where star formation can begin anew. The expanding debris cloud known as Cassiopeia A is an example of this final phase of the stellar life cycle. Light from the supernova explosion that created this remnant would have been first seen in planet Earth's sky about 350 years ago, although it took that light 11,000 years to reach us. This sharp NIRCam image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows the still hot filaments and knots in the supernova remnant. The whitish, smoke-like outer shell of the expanding blast wave is about 20 light-years across. Light echoes from the massive star's cataclysmic explosion are also identified in Webb's detailed image of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A.

-via the APOD site

Compelling..................

One could argue that the primary role of a leader is to identify and convey a compelling North Star. If your people are clear on a North Star, they are clear on (almost) everything else. Everything comes to a focal point. And it aligns their efforts. It guides them on all of their work, including their micro-actions, micro-routines, and micro-behaviors – without requiring micro-management.

-as extracted from this Gaping Void post

Explain to me again...........

.....................how much we are really capable of knowing, and understanding, all of this:

Crashing...................

 ......in slow motion.  In a billion years or so, our quiet little galaxy might be involved in a major collision.  Is it too soon to worry? What do the computer models say?  Back story and enlargeable photo are here:

Paint the stars................

Starry Night Over the Rhone   Oil on canvass    1888

 When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion, then I go out and paint the stars.

-Vincent van Gogh

Blowing bubbles................

 Explanation: Massive stars can blow bubbles. The featured image shows perhaps the most famous of all star-bubbles, NGC 7635, also known simply as The Bubble Nebula. Although it looks delicate, the 7-light-year diameter bubble offers evidence of violent processes at work. Above and left of the Bubble's center is a hot, O-type star, several hundred thousand times more luminous and some 45-times more massive than the Sun. A fierce stellar wind and intense radiation from that star has blasted out the structure of glowing gas against denser material in a surrounding molecular cloud. The intriguing Bubble Nebula and associated cloud complex lie a mere 7,100 light-years away toward the boastful constellation Cassiopeia. This sharp, tantalizing view of the cosmic bubble is a reprocessed composite of previously acquired Hubble Space Telescope image data.

-as cut and pasted from APOD

Sometimes............

 

Laying on my back, watching the stars emerge, I was struck by how they'd been there all along, invisibly lining my day even when I couldn't see them.  Sometimes the darkness reveals, it's ways more mysterious than light's.  Sometimes the darkness gives a gift of stars by which we can navigate our way home.

-Boyd Varty, Cathedral of the Wild

image via

One trillion stars.............

.......................................................232 million light-years away. 

Explanation: In this Hubble Space Telescope image the bright, spiky stars lie in the foreground toward the heroic northern constellation Perseus and well within our own Milky Way galaxy. In sharp focus beyond is UGC 2885, a giant spiral galaxy about 232 million light-years distant. Some 800,000 light-years across compared to the Milky Way's diameter of 100,000 light-years or so, it has around 1 trillion stars. That's about 10 times as many stars as the Milky Way. Part of a current investigation to understand how galaxies can grow to such enormous sizes, UGC 2885 was also part of astronomer Vera Rubin's pioneering study of the rotation of spiral galaxies. Her work was the first to convincingly demonstrate the dominating presence of dark matter in our universe.

And the question arose...........

........................................................"How much should we know?"  And the answer gently wafted by, " Not so much."

Explanation: Beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 6744 is nearly 175,000 light-years across, larger than our own Milky Way. It lies some 30 million light-years distant in the southern constellation Pavo and appears as only a faint, extended object in small telescopes. We see the disk of the nearby island universe tilted towards our line of sight in this remarkably detailed galaxy portrait, a telescopic view that spans an area about the angular size of a full moon. In it, the giant galaxy's elongated yellowish core is dominated by the light from old, cool stars. Beyond the core, grand spiral arms are filled with young blue star clusters and speckled with pinkish star forming regions. An extended arm sweeps past a smaller satellite galaxy (NGC 6744A) at the lower right. NGC 6744's galactic companion is reminiscent of the Milky Way's satellite galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud.

      "The simplicity of the universe is very different from the simplicity of a machine.  He who sees moral nature out and out, and thoroughly knows how knowledge is acquired and character formed is a pedant.  The simplicity of nature is not that which may easily be read, but is inexhaustible.  The last analysis can no wise be made.  We judge of a man's wisdom by his hope, knowing that the perception of the inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth.  The wild fertility of nature is felt in comparing our rigid names and reputations with our fluid consciousness."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his 1841 Spiritual Laws essay

50,000 light-year wide close-up....

The question was posed, "How much should we know?" and the answer gently wafted by, "Not so much."

Messier 61 Close Up Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble, ESO, Amateur Data; Processing & Copyright: Robert Gendler & Roberto Colombari
Explanation: Image data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the European Southern Observatory, and small telescopes on planet Earth are combined in this magnificent portrait of face-on spiral galaxy Messier 61 (M61). A mere 55 million light-years away in the Virgo Cluster of Galaxies, M61 is alsoknown as NGC 4303. It's considered to be an example of a barred spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way. Like other spiral galaxies, M61 also features sweeping spiral arms, cosmic dust lanes, pinkish star forming regions, and young blue star clusters. The bright galactic core is offset to the left in this 50 thousand light-year wide close-up.

from the Astronomy Picture of the Day

The view.............................

.......................................from Planet Earth:

Biggitude...............................

"M100 is appropriately known as a grand design spiral galaxy. It is a large galaxy of over 100 billion stars."

All the information you want (and a larger photo) is here 

If you are interested in the "are there more stars in the sky or grains of sand on the beach" question, you can pursue answers here.

Benign..............................

“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”

-Albert Camus

image via

Meanwhile, only 5,000 light years away......

enlargeable photo and back story here