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Comment by HenryBemis | Hacker News Reader

And when 'zooming in' and seeing the top 2/3 of the photo (https://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/im...) I am super amazed that all these small discs showing are galaxies. GALAXIES (sorry for the caps).

How tiny are we (Humans, Earth, Solar system)... less than a speck of dust in the Sahara.

I used to look up in space when I was growing up and there wasn't any light pollution to the small town I was growing up in. At some point I think I started suffering from 'cosmic horror'. In later years I would pay attention only to the moon, and that reduced my stress significantly.

Nowadays (like in this bit of news, with photos) when I stick to the small photo in an article, I feel ok. When I see it in full size and I zoom in, and I realize that "sh*t! these 5-10-50 tiny white marks are GALAXIES.. and I have to change topics/tabs to keep the cosmic horror at bay.

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Interesting. I've also always had a visceral response to particularly clear night skies - but it's only ever been a profoundly positive feeling. It kind of erases the idea that my "problems" have any significance at all.

The loss of dark skies is so painful, maybe the worst thing modern life brought to us. I remember laying in the grass with my grandma looking at the stars for hours, she would tell me how the whole village gathered around the only TV they had to watch the moon landing live, about sputnik, galaxies, satellites, &c. there aren't many things as mesmerising, maybe watching a fire or the ocean waves, but it doesn't trigger the same emotions in me.

I don't travel much but when I go to remote areas star gazing is up there on my list of things to do; watch the stars until you're about to pass out from hypothermia, go back inside, make some tea, enjoy the fireplace, forget about the daily (non) problems, it never gets old

Experience that all the time with the same imagery, with the same amazement / horror combination.

What's more amazing is when you share this fact to most people "did you know each dot here is a GALAXY, not a star!" they go "heh... interesting" and shrug.

For some reason that makes the whole thing even crazier to me

I think it just doesn't really click for people most of the time. Eg for my mom no amount of showing science pics and explaining the scale of the distances conveyed things, it only really clicked when Jupiter became visible in the night sky as a particularly bright and large point of light which caught her interest, and when we moved to somewhere dark enough that the galactic plane was faintly noticeable.

Yeah, I haven't seen the milky way with naked eye for a few years.

Cosmic horror is a good one. I've only seen the Milky Way with my own eyes a couple of times and the last time gave me an existential cosmic horror too.

I went to sleep thinking about the unignitable size and age of what's all around us in every direction, but particularly that I had just looked at our own galaxy... a galaxy that has been there for billions of years, has always been there my entire and is there right now and there's only this tiny invisible thin bit of atmosphere separating us from it.

Then I thought about the fact tha our solar system is orbiting it right now, and we're orbiting the sun on an invisible track, and the moon orbits us on its own invisible track too.

That's quite a lot to deal with when you only woke up for a pee in the middle of a night in a camping holiday in Wales.

I kinda had an out-of-body experience when watching the Kurzgesagt video on The Largest Black Hole in the Universe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FH9cgRhQ-k

Watching the zoom-out to picture ultra-massive black holes is surreal.

To fuel your cosmic horror: Some of the dots may even be galaxy clusters

Hahahahaha cheers, I had just forgotten about this and was going to sleep, but hey, what's a couple more hours of freaking out! :)

And yet, it is the atomic nucleus that is one of the most complex objects in nature.

Complex in terms of our attempts to fully define it, or?

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