“It’s full of stars!”
Francis Sedgemore, Friday 5 March 2010
NGC 346 (source: ESO) – click for a larger view
Over two hundred thousand light years away, in the constellation of Tucana (the Toucan), the young star cluster NGC 346 is like many others. With images of such astronomical phenomena you see a relative concentration of points of light, and possibly a wispy nebular of gas and dust. The pictures are often pretty, and some may even be described as dramatic. But what impresses me most about images of star fields is the sense of scale and perspective they can impart.
The computer on which I write is an Apple Mac. One of the features of Apple’s OS X operating system is a backup program that takes historical snapshots of the system, and the user interface to this so-called “Time Machine” is a field of stars that move out of the screen toward the viewer. The effect is an example of “eye candy”, and to my mind it is rather tacky.
Look at a static image of real stars, however, and the power of imagination alone can set the mind roving through the field. With a large enough picture of stars in front of me, I feel myself sucked into the image, and this can be an exhilarating experience.
The Small Magellanic Cloud within which NGC 346 is located may be no more than a tiny satellite galaxy of our Milky Way, but the distances involved are nonetheless vast. To put matters in stark if not ludicrous perspective, NGC 346 is around 200 light years across, or nearly two million billion kilometres. This is roughly equivalent to seven thousand billion times the length of Wales, or fifty times the distance between the Sun and its nearest stellar neighbours.
Feed the writer! 
Friday 5 March 2010 at 13:45 GMT
Is NGC 346 in the Delta Quadrant, or is it still in the Alpha Quadrant? And are the Borg in its vicinity?
Live long and prosper. Go Boldly.
Friday 5 March 2010 at 13:48 GMT
Can a 200 light year-wide star cluster fit through your average wormhole?
Friday 5 March 2010 at 15:28 GMT
Awe inspiring!
Friday 5 March 2010 at 17:56 GMT
I am indeed filled with awe and wonder. (No, really, this kind of stuff just really boggles my mind.)
But, to me, it doesn’t look anything like a Toucan.
There we are: from the sublime to the ridiculous in two sentences.
Friday 5 March 2010 at 19:30 GMT
You don’t need a wormhole to get to the Delta Quadrant – that’s the Gamma Quadrant. God lives in the middle of the Milky Way in a sector of its own (apart from the Cytherians) outside the Quadrants. Kirk met him there apparently. Keep up.
(I’m not making this up – its on Wikipedia so it must be true. )
Live long and prosper. Go boldly. Get your anorak dry cleaned at Johnstones every 18months like I do.
Friday 5 March 2010 at 21:41 GMT
The constellation, John. Do keep up, man. Bloody humanities scholars!
Saturday 6 March 2010 at 09:20 GMT
Fair play to John – I can’t see a Toucan in there either. can you repost the picture with the stars that form the Toucan circled?
Saturday 6 March 2010 at 15:36 GMT
No! Use your imagination. You could probably find a good likeness of Ena Sharples up there if you try hard enough.
Tuesday 9 March 2010 at 11:03 GMT
I like the idea of the size of Wales being used as a stellar unit.
“How far to Barnard’s Star?”
“Er, that would be 35 Billion Wales”
“Ta love!”
Tuesday 9 March 2010 at 11:14 GMT
Tidy.
Wednesday 10 March 2010 at 17:44 GMT
If commercial FTL doesn’t become available soon I may have to drive there. Of course, my elderly Corolla is not a gas-guzzler, but even then it’s and iffy proposition.