• Stalinwolf@lemmy.ca
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    23 hours ago

    I never fully grasped the true scale of a single galaxy (and then expanded that understanding to the observable universe) until I hopped in my ship in Elite Dangerous and actually set off to cross one. Holy fucking shit, does it really help put it into perspective when you’re traveling between vast galactic arms, hopping individual stars 50-70 Ly at a time and trying your damndest not to stretch yourself too thin in fear of running out of scoopable fuel/stars.

    If I were an Astronomy teacher, Elite would be my most profound and precious tool.

  • starik@lemmy.zip
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    2 days ago

    A couple problems here:

    1. The image resolution isn’t high enough for a banana to be visible at this scale.
    2. This isn’t the Milky Way (it’s impossible to take a picture from outside our own galaxy), so bananas do not exist there. This means the banana would have to be photoshopped in, in which case you might as well photoshop a map scale.

    Nice picture, but I call BS 🤔

    Edit: Omg, I forgot to mention the most obvious giveaway. Our supermassive black hole doesn’t have a quasar! Busted!

  • melsaskca@lemmy.ca
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    22 hours ago

    This reminds me of an Italo Calvino short story about a guy doing backyard telescope observatory space viewing (whew) and he spots someone holding a sign on a distant star stating “I know what you did”. The viewer now starts calculating exactly where he would have been at the time including light speed and distance light travels to reach him and all sorts of other calcs until he determines the time in the past and finally realizes “Whoa! He saw that!?”.

  • Stupidmanager@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    You really should eat that banana before it goes bad. I see spots on it and one area looks soft and bruised.

  • Nima@leminal.space
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    2 days ago

    I can’t seem to find the banana all that easily.

    …your mom though. she’s clearly visible at this scale. 😎