That’s incredible. Illustrates how incomprehensibly big galaxies really are. There’s a thing 2.5 million light years away which still appears 4x bigger than the Moon.

Very much incomprehensible, not only for outer celestial objects since we most probably will never fully discover our own physical earth planet or human body, let alone our thinking brain and our elusive consciousness.

Andromedia the closest galaxy to Milky Way (MW) is estimated to have one trillion stars while MW itself is estimated to have 250 billions. God really knows how many of them really exist and who's counting anyway? It's a blind faith at its worst to pretend we know the numbers since it's most likely that the earth and its sun bound astronomers (including the farthest distance ever Voyager spacecraft) are several orders of magnitudes off the marks.

It's also estimated that's more than a trillion number of stars inside the two galaxies (Andromeda and MW), not number of planets, not even the number of moons (the very title of this HN post).

Overall it's also estimated that there's more than a trillion number of galaxies (not stars) inside our universe.

To make matter even more complicated, all of these celestial objects are moving in very high speed relative to each others and none is static. These galaxy are millions or billions light years away from earth and by the time their EM signals has reached earth, they probably have already dissappeared or morphed into something else.

How about non observable part of the universe?

How about other parallel universes that physicists claim to exist?

My personal conclusion to this mind boggling facts is that to assume and conclude there is only earth that has living creatures is very much premature and naive.

> just imagine if you could see all those galaxies and nebulae with your naked eye

I think I’d wind up buying the Vision Pro if it can realistically portray seeing the world in a wider spectrum than our eyes can. I don’t want cartoonish images of objects pasted into the sky. I want to see what I would perceive if we e.g. gene therapied a few extra cones into our eyes to see more of the EM spectrum.

Oh boy if you're willing to spend money to look at the night sky - but feel like AR falls short currently - I highly recommend looking into NODs, something like a PVS-14, you might be able to pick one up second hand for the price of a new vision pro. Unfortunately photomultiplier are still quite expensive even if they are only gen2 :( some really cool tech though.

Hmm, spending that much on seeing the stars vs. augmented reality... I might lean toward the stars

Definitely not arguing with you! Though I have a soft spot for analog tech in this area. I think AR might still have a very bright future, especially if you're learning about the night sky. I've spent many hours scanning the sky with an app I found that had an AR feature that allows you to point your camera at the sky and get an overlay on everything (including sattelites!).

I’m interested in that app if you have a link.

It's called Star Walk 2 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vitotechno... Just a FYI that if you choose to purchase the app you will still have to purchase the "all in one bundle" inside the app, I believe it's ~$5 and it gives you the sattelites, extended solar system, deep space objects and more. There's also a free ad supported version that offers the same base catalogue.

Night vision goggles have made immense improvements in recent years. Although the new technology in night vision is also very expensive. If they ever become accessible to the average consumer, they will change the world profoundly. Because you can walk during night as if it was day.

For astronomy, they probably won't make a difference, but it shouldn't be impossible to make goggle technology that converts astronomically interesting wavelengths to the visible spectrum.

It's not the wavelengths that are the problem but the exposure times; even with our best sensors we still need long exposures to capture compelling images of galaxies and nebulae. I don't think it will ever be possible in real time.

that's not a problem with displaying that information.

the post you replied to is not wanting to see like Geordi LaForge from Star Trek: The Next Generation; in real time. they're (at least I think they are) wanting to visualize already captured information, such as x-ray and radio emissions overlaid a view of the night sky.

> ...I want to see what I would perceive if we e.g. gene therapied a few extra cones into our eyes to see more of the EM spectrum.

Maybe I misunderstood this part then?