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Comment by aidos | Hacker News Reader

Awesome.

I was lucky enough to see Andromeda with the naked eye while doing a transatlantic yacht race. Believe it or not it took me a couple of days to find Pegasus but then it was obvious each night as I gazed up at the sky.

We're on a collision course with Andromeda, right? Those trillion stars crashing in are going to make for a wonderful fireworks display :)

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The thing is, stars are so far apart from each other that there won't be any collisions. From wikipedia: "While the Andromeda Galaxy contains about 1 trillion (1012) stars and the Milky Way contains about 300 billion (3×1011), the chance of even two stars colliding is negligible because of the huge distances between the stars."

link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda–Milky_Way_collision

You're correct, the likelihood of stars colliding is near zero, but the gas that forms stars in both galaxies will collide and that will create quite a spectacular view. It will likely resemble something like this: http://hugepic.io/bfc195a2b/4.00/2.02/-77.61

Space is full of a LOT of empty space. Maybe even more amazing to myself, is the scale works almost the same in inverse. There's also a lot of space at the tiniest scales.

Scale of our solar system: http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.h...

You are right about the collision course. The two will slowly merge into a bigger galaxy like in this picture: http://cas.sdss.org/dr6/en/proj/basic/galaxies/images/752-6-...

Wikipedia also has a video but this picture also illustrates it well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_co...

We represented both galaxies in 3D crystal cubes in case that's of interest: http://cosmic3d.com/

Nice. I've been looking for that; only found some Japanese outfit that made one years ago, for (the yen equivelent of) $100 ... out of my price range. Glad to see yours is much more reasonable.

Curious about accuracy ... how many bubbles (stars) are etched?

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