beautiful
i have a bunch of gaLAXY PHOTOS
so gorgeous and humbling

That one's my current desktop. :-)

what amazes me is often by the time the light from distant stars reaches us, that sun has long since been burned out.

In a way it's a time machine. It's quite amazing the photons from the very furthest observable objects escaped their stars some 14 billion years ago! Wow!

Though I do understand red dwarf stars have a very, very long life. Some put the estimated lifespan over a trillion years.

The other amazing thing is massive stars burn their fuel in a very short time. Whereas the Sun has a lifespan of 8 or so billion years, Eta Carinae might last just a few million years. It's a truly massive star, well over 100 times the mass of the Sun.

http://cronodon.com/sitebuilder/images/Hypergiant.jpg

I wanted to write a story where the past was looked into by using ships that travel faster than light, then setup a galaxy wide grid of telescope type things pointed back at the earth... so that they could see the surface of the earth from millions of years ago. Couldn't figure out how to put it into a plot though.

Still not coming up with any ideas. Except maybe using one of these grid ships as a backdrop for another story line. Maybe a commentary about the REAL history and how what we read is often written by the victor... doubled up with some kind of relevant story to that happening somewhere near that ship... like maybe they are seeing into the 1800's and watching the native Americans being massacred while a nearby world is being terraformed and they discover that there IS like on it after all... and how that relates... or something like that.

Hmm, like ships fitted with Alcubierre drives?

Interestingly, a NASA physicist (Harold White) has a team and lab set up to experiment on the the principles behind this concept. He poured over Alcubierre's calculations and with a slight design change for the ship determined instead of needing exotic matter with the mass of a Jupiter it would only require the mass of perhaps the Voyager spacecraft.

nerdy guys talkin about nerdy things

gotta love it !

i love those photos because theyre fantastical and poetic
graceful and vibrating
sacred geometry (thankyou troy) or sumptuous organice shapes

and because theyre humbling

and made of the same stuff we all are -- stardust

nice desktop

i cant show you my desktop
someone would get me banned for it :)