billions and billions

The stars are always there. Sometimes we can't see them, but they're still there. They make us feel small. You can't count them, but you can try. Everytime you go through the course of a night without looking at the stars, you're missing 50% of what's going on that night. In 60 years you'll probably be in a different place, you'll look, act, feel, and think differently than you do now. The whole world will have changed, but if you look up, the night sky will look just like it did 60 years ago. There are infinite patterns, so the stars are kind of like a giant ink blot test where you can see whatever you want to see. Lets say I want to take a gander at the Andromeda Galaxy, which is the closest galaxy to the Milky Way. Andromeda is 2.2 million light years away: so you say "Wow, who cares?" After punching some numbers, Andromeda Galaxy is 13,490,400,000,000,000,000 miles away, yet I can see it with a 4.5-inch telescope. Just a thought. Star gazing is essentially time travel; what you see actually happened years and years ago. Stars are tools and toys. You can find your way around with stars. You can feel the Earth spinning when you look at the stars. They always give you something to do late at night. In many cases you can't see them if you look at them, only if you look near them. The longer you look at them, the more of them you see. Does anyone else find the night sky interesting? Maybe you should.

Look up.

-alex