This one's mine: https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=165.0972&dec=28.9753&lay...

Here's mine: https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=95.9367&dec=-52.7034&lay...

It's not a galaxy so much as a hyper-dimensional string wormhole network nexus created by one of the most advanced races in the cosmos.

This one right under it is also neat: https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=148.7892&dec=69.0730&lay...

https://science.nasa.gov/galaxy-wars-m81-and-m82

https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=264.9876&dec=74.0333&lay...

Another one: two feeding off each other: https://viewer.legacysurvey.org//?ra=187.6434&dec=41.6737&la...

I like mine too: https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=25.0865&dec=9.8563&layer...

With sound.

Anecdotally, the first time I saw the Milky Way with my bare eyes was almost a religious experience.

I think the expression you might be looking for is "a contemplative state".

I took my kid camping in Joshua Tree last year and we spent a lot of time just taking in all the stars and waving at the occasional satellite zipping overhead. If someone's never done this, I cannot possibly over-recommend it.

I think I remember reading about the latest and greatest direct measurement of stellar distances, and how it's a huge number of stars but a very small radius relative to our whole galaxy. And of course there's all the dust and stuff in the way of viewing. So my belief is that what I want is impossible, but I think I have heard that we're fairly certain our galaxy is a barred spiral?

I have no sense of how much of the Galaxy it maps, but I know it's crucial for distance ladder measures because it will constrain the distance to the large Magellanic cloud better than ever before, so I think it's measuring individual stars at that range

Doing astrometry and proper motion measurements for more stars than ever before, very cool

For bright stars, Gaia can measure parallaxes (and therefore distances) throughout a sizeable fraction of the Milky Way. But the fainter the star is, the closer it has to be for Gaia to measure its parallax. The other issue is that there's dust that obscures much of the Galaxy, limiting the range that Gaia can see to. If you take all these effects into account, you find that Gaia can "only" measure parallaxes for about 1% of the stars in the Milky Way. Still, that's orders of magnitude more stars than had parallaxes just a few years ago.

An early version of this work with a gallery of objects that might match what the Milky Way looks like (given all the observational uncertainties) is discussed at https://www.news.pitt.edu/milkywaycolor .

A couple of the resulting scientific papers are at https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015ApJ...809...96L/abstra... and https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016ApJ...833..220L/abstra... and

2. Can gravitation lensing work in a daisy chain fashion by having multiple galaxies positioned ever so precisely to cause the light from our galaxy to travel in a semi-circle arc back to us?

2. See 1.

Regarding the first question why can't there be a planet let's say in Andromeda with a lake that would reflect back the light from our galaxy? That's only 2.5 million lightyears x 2.

[0] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/52167/since-ther...

2) Kinda maybe https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/52167/since-ther...

(I'm totally faking knowing the tool though that's what comes up when I klick it with show galaxies active)

https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=165.1234&dec=28.9911&lay...

Anyway, yours is a beautiful comment

http://leda.univ-lyon1.fr/ledacat.cgi?o=PGC46727

I clicked the bright objects on the right and then Siena Galaxy Atlas.

Here is what I found : https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=147.3584&dec=53.5565&lay...

I wonder what kind of astronomical object it is. Given the color, the term red dwarf pop in my head, but I actually have no idea: given red shift, aren’t all sufficiently distant objects all red or bellow by the time they arrive at us?

This one ^^^ is curious. Kinda looks like it's burning. (I know, all are burning, but whatever.)

https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=346.0946&dec=-4.8791&lay...

https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=32.2993&dec=-43.5177&lay...

Though seems like an artifact for me.

There are 4 or 5 stars in hubble ultra deep field and 10000 galaxies.

There are a billion galaxies.

So roughly 2^30 galaxies.

Thus, there would be a 50% chance of collision after roughly 2^15 or 30,000 people picked a galaxy.

The chance of you having a collision at that point is still about 2^-15.

And how many people do you expect to follow these directions, anyway?

Could you elaborate?

The basic idea is simple enough: if you have a random collection of people, and keep adding more, eventually 2 of them will have the same birthday. If you run that experiment a bunch of times, eventually you’ll get the average number of people where there’s a 50% chance of having a “collision”. The surprising part is that the number is so small: in this case, it’s 23.

When you're handing out 250 pieces of string it's easy to tell that something with a 1/365 chance per string is likely.

For this situation, if you put 50 thousand people in a room then they each have 50 thousand ways to pair up, so you're looking at over a billion opportunities to have a one-in-a-billion coincidence. (50k * 50k / 2 = 1.25 billion)

It is a "starburst galaxy" which means it is undergoing a lot of intense star formation, I think that's why it has pretty colours from all the gas clouds and activity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starburst_galaxy

https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=167.4707&dec=24.2626&lay...