What real flying saucers look like!

Seen this week while hanging out at the end of the driveway, as temperatures drop and a mug of tea is firmly in hand. 

The effort produced a nice shot of Galaxy NGC7331 and friends. This group can be found in the northern constellation Pegasus. Good thing, as this is the part of the sky I can see best as the yard's trees grow larger.

While most Summer nights have been marred by wildfire smoke, tonight was unusually calm and clear. The image shows good detail and color. All the more amazing since 7331 is 50 million light years away. Its friends behind are 300-500 million light years away.

The farther away they are, the more we're limited to just seeing their brightest parts, which is the center—a region of densest stars surrounding a giant black hole.

Looking closely, I can find a few other tiny galaxies that are more like 1 Billion light years distant. That's about the useful limit for my gear.

It's amazing that ol' Bill Herschell first noted this galaxy in 1784, though it was a blur and he wouldn't have guessed what it really was. So many space features were discovered during that first golden age of telescopes.

Scientists once thought this galaxy looked like our own. With better instruments and observation, they now say our Milky Way is structured a little differently. NGC7331 is a continuous spiral from the center outward, whereas the Milky Way shoots its material out from the nucleus in more of a straight line before the spiral forms (a classification called "barred galaxy").

TMI? Perhaps. It happens.

What really occupies my mind on such a clear night, with crickets chirping slowly and coyotes howling in the distance, is the possibility of life on other galaxies. After all, each one is made up of 100 thousand million stars, or more. Are any beings there looking at us, asking the same question?

Such a heavy thought is made lighter by tonight's jazz tune by saxaphonist Stan Getz, called 𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘳 𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘯.