Venus = 67 million miles
Earth = 93 million miles
Mars = 142 million miles
Jupiter = 483 million miles
Saturn = 887 million miles
Uranus = 1,783 million miles (1.8 billion miles)
Neptune = 2,794 million miles (2.8 billion miles)
And, as Carl Sagan writes ~
The sun is but one lonely star in a self-gravitating assemblage of suns called the Milky Way Galaxy.
And we are thirty thousand light years from the center. Staring up at the Milky Way last Saturday from high up and deep within the North Cascades, wrapped in down and as comfortable and at peace as I can imagine being as the light of the day gave way to the dark of night, these distances were on my mind and the reminder of how alone each of these planets, all of the stars, and I guess by correlation all of us – really are. Separated by hundreds, thousands, billions of light years. There were a couple other groups up there, but inside my sleeping bag staring up into space I didn't notice. I was alone.
To gaze up at the stars is incredible in the fact the sense is always there that nothing is as it appears and everything is always changing. The nearest spiral galaxy like our own is M31 in the constellation Andromeda, and is 2 million light-years away. So of course that means we're seeing it as it was 2 million years ago. What does it look like now? What about the quasars 5 billion light years away?
These distances are mesmerizing. Infinite. Nothing stays the same.
2 comments:
Sometimes I think it's unfortunate we can't see those stars from the city. But then also know that we would take that for granted, therefore think it's best to save moments like star filled skies for when you are in fact alone in the mountains.
Yeah, I'm all about not taking anything for granted. And you're right – that's a big part of being in the mountains or even just far from home like laying on the ground somewhere in the middle of Utah (where the next morning I ended up taking the picture of the canyon that's at the top of this blog).
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