170,000 Lightyears Never Looked So Good

For those of you that know that a light year is “a long way” but were never really sure what that measurement meant or how it came about, you’ve come to the right place. If there is one thing I love its talking about light-years. But before we get into all that, go to www.space.com and check out the Hubble telescopes ‘Best of’ pics and then we’ll talk.....Quickly please....
Ok so now that your back, I assume your in awe of what you saw. Yea, me too. Seeing what exists in space tells me that there is an order to our world that is utterly incomprehensible to our pea brains. Not only that, but its so immense that we can’t actually see it because we are either right in the middle as a piece of space dust, or its just so incredibly far away that there is no hope of being exposed to it through anything other than this Hubble gadget. I don’t want to get into a religious conversation here, not even for a second, but I think there is without a doubt something so beyond us at work in the heavens. Not sure what and don’t want to hear how sure you think you are of who and what it might be. My only intention here is to send you to look at these photos. They are amazing. Now, with that said, lets get back to the meat of this post. Light-years. It goes like this..
ahem..
Light travels at 186,000 miles per second so when you do the math, without fail you will come to a year that totals 5,865,696,000,000. For those who get the tens column mixed up with the hundreds etc, I’m going to spell it out. One light year is five trillion, eight hundred sixty five billion, six hundred ninety six million miles. (As the crow flies of course) The Pin Wheel Galaxy as featured in the photos from the HubbleCam is 170,000 light-years across. Hard...no, impossible to imagine when looking at its grace and beauty as photographed by the Hubble. How can something so enormous be in complete and undeniably perfect form with all the chaos in the universe? Beats me, that’s why I suspect something bigger than what we have the capability to comprehend and that something probably doesn’t care what our political agenda may be when we say the crazy things that we as humans say, like god is punishing New Orleans for its this or its that, the list goes on. My point is if you can’t even begin to understand a fraction of what this higher power is up to, how is it that you were able to puzzle out what it was thinking, much less place blame on others for things that happen within our tiny solar system? I will never understand that, but I find it endlessly entertaining none-the-less. Actually, my whole purpose in writing about lightyears was to put into perspective how long it takes me in to update my blog. Pretty darn quick if you ask me.