Your Bit of Perspective for the Day

The picture above (click it to enlarge) was linked to in Gregg Easterbrook's preview of the AFC. As you can see, the column drifts away from football from time to time. So, what's the picture? Here's Easterbrook:

Researchers led by Swinburne University of Technology, in Australia, released this map of the "nearby" cosmos. The map contains about 100,000 dots. The dots are not stars; each dot represents a galaxy, and galaxies are thought to average about 100 billion stars each. Thus the area depicted contains roughly 10 to the 15th power stars, a number far too huge to bother attempting to fathom. And the map merely shows galaxies nearby. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is at the center of the map. On the cosmic scale, a place with 100 billion stars is a dot.