Hmm, it worked just fine a week ago. No, I don't have another link for that, sorry.

Maybe it'll resurface...could be a temporary DNS problem. Or maybe they just plain 'went dark'.

Here's another orrery, but it doesn't move....just gives a static picture of the planets' positions.

http://www.fourmilab.to/cgi-bin/uncgi/Solar

And another one that moves, but only shows the inner planets (Mercury through Mars) --

http://www-astro.phast.umass.edu/courseware/java/planets/planets.html

Hi John, It worked this am when I tried. It is great thanks. I will try the others tomorrow. On way to work.

John,

Isn't Orion in our own Milky Way galaxy?

Oh yeah, absolutely. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to distinguish such detail from here. There are some formations in the Magellanic Clouds (link to photo page) that can be seen from earth, but they're two small satellite galaxies that revolve around the Milky Way and so are relatively close to us. Features from other galaxies farther away can't be resolved in detail from our vantage point. So any time you see those breathtaking photos of nebulae/star clusters/etc., they're within our own galaxy. That still can be an immense distance from earth! The Great Orion Nebula is about 1600 light-years from here; that's 9,405,881,533,440,000 miles. Give or take.

(A light-year is the distance light travels in a year. And light travels about 186,284 miles per second. That's more than 7 trips around the world in one second of time!)

The Milky Way itself is about 100,000 - 120,000 light-years in diameter, depending on who you read. And that's just this galaxy. Mind-boggling distances involved here. Even the closest star to us (besides the sun), Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light-years away. NASA's space shuttles travel at about 17,500 mph while in orbit around the earth; even at that speed it would take almost 161,000 years to fly to Proxima Centauri.

Of course there are thousands of other galaxies also visible from earth; all the more since the Hubble space telescope (and now the Spitzer telescope as well) came into use. Galaxies other than the close ones that orbit the Milky Way are so far away it's hard to conceive. The Andromeda galaxy, for example, is about 2 million light-years from us.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap991114.html

There are many, many others a lot farther away than that.

And the Lord of heaven's in total control of every single atom that makes up every bit of all this far-flung stuff. A Being that big, that huge -- and still He's supremely interested in lil' ol' us.

Amazing.


[edit -- added link to Magellanic Clouds page)

[ March 07, 2004, 02:22 PM: Message edited by: John ]

Thanks, John.

I would venture a good guess what you will be doing in eternity

I know what I will be doing too!

I wonder why God made it sooooooo big.

Because He likes a Big Family???

Speaking of thousands of galaxies --

quote:

---

Hubble's deepest view ever unveils earliest galaxies
Space Telescope Science Institute News Release
Posted: March 9, 2004

Astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute today unveiled the deepest portrait of the visible universe ever achieved by humankind. . . .

Called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), the million-second-long exposure....contains an estimated 10,000 galaxies. In ground-based images, the patch of sky in which the galaxies reside (just one-tenth the diameter of the full Moon) is largely empty. Located in the constellation Fornax, the region is below the constellation Orion.

---

http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0403/09deepfield/

(Some of the scientific assumptions in the article run contrary to what we know from Genesis, but so does the information in most all secular science articles.)

10,000 galaxies in a patch of sky one-tenth the diameter of the full moon? And that's just what's visible with instruments we have at present.

Like Carl Sagan said -- "billions and billions...."