Perseids and Distance with a Tea Kettle to Boot

I was out in the driveway looking at the night sky because the Perseids are hitting their apex of activity.
I looked to the south at Sagittarius, the intergalactic tea kettle, and noticed that it was dumping its wares onto Payson. Right then three shooting stars passed thru its handle, one a lovely shade of green.

I started thinking about when we're looking at the sky we're looking at a dozen years to hundreds of thousands of years to millions of years of history. When we look at the Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest one to ours, we're looking at light that's reaching us 2.2 million years after it started its journey. The light that bounced off of Jupiter did so about 32 minutes before it reaches our eyes. We look at it thinking we're seeing the present, but we're not. Thirty-two minutes almost seems conceivable, but 2.2 million years boggles my mind--and that's the closest galaxy.

During the night, we're in the present and at the same time we are 32 minutes or 2,700 years or 5 million years in the past.

I think it's brilliant.



And with the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, we're talking billions of years and light that we don't even perceive without one of the most powerful telescopes on the job.