[RightWhale]

It’s impresively close and it seems they should have known what it was before a century ago, but they didn’t. Then, they knew of only one galaxy, the Milky Way, which is what ‘galaxy’ means anyway.

[Conan the Librarian]

Before photography, even the best scopes showed these beauties as fuzzy blobs. It wasn’t until Edwin Hubble that someone figured out that they were outside of the Galaxy.

Now, many amateur astronomers have scopes, cameras, and other equipment that the giants of Astronomy would have killed for. We can see what they only dreamed about.

[econjack]

I'll bet if you showed this picture to most people and asked them to comment on it, they would refer to the galaxies as “out of focus stars”. Most people don't have any concept of what a galaxy is or its size. Show them a picture of a spiral galaxy and tell them that one of those little pin points of light is like our entire solar system with the sun and its planets and it just blows them away. I still can't wrap my mind around the concept of infinite space. The universe is still expanding...but expanding into what? Aw man...there goes another night of sleep...