The galaxy is a gallery


Idea by Mads Dam

It's all out there



All the images you already know (plus those you didn't) already exist out there. Somewhere in the galaxy. If you only knew where to look...

Minor order in major chaos



Our galaxy offers at least 100.000.000.000 stars, and that is a quite large pile of points.

Disregarding the spiral form, this constitutes a lot of random points scattered all over galactic space. But, inside a big chaos there are also many small pockets of high local order.

The point of view



One sum is the total number of stars in the galaxy.

Another is the sum of images if we add all possible views: looking from all points of view, in all directions.

A third factor could be zooming in and out of the same image.

This creates a potential gallery of trillions of possible views / images.

Mona Lisa is out there...



To find a specific view or image we 'only' need to sort the galaxy, which is not easily done but nevertheless perfectly possible. So if you know how Mona Lisa looks like, you can find her again, out there somewhere. If you only knew where...

This isn't monkey business



I know this may remind you of the old joke: a group of monkeys typing random characters will eventually write everything Shakespeare ever wrote. But in this case we don't have to wait for the monkeys; they have already done their job (and got their bananas)...

New kind of star images



The pictures, I'm suggesting, are not the traditional kind. The old images only offer a dozen stars, or less. Thus our imagination has to add the remaining 99%. This new kind of images may offer thousands of stars, like a sparkling photo...



Mads Dam, january 2010

Stars in the night sky



How many stars can be seen from earth? About 3000. However, that is only if viewing conditions are optimal: no clouds and no light pollution. Inside a major city stars may be completely invisible, drowned by our own artificial light...

Stars in our galaxy



The number of stars in a galaxy may vary, from a few millions to hundreds of billions. Our own galaxy, Milky Way, contains a hundred thousand million stars. Cirka 0.1 trillion.

Number of stars: at least 0.1 trillion.
Diameter: 100.000 light-years.
Thickness: 1000 light-years.
(Speed of light is 1 billion km / hour).

Read more in Wikipedia

Other astronomical numbers



We have more cells in our bodies than there are stars in our galaxy. We also have more cells in our bodies than galaxies in the entire universe. Finally, we have more atoms in our bodies than there are stars in the Universe..!