Galaxies may not evoke a visceral reaction by non-astronomy-minded individuals (unlike beautiful, colorful nebula), however I've always felt a bit smaller when considering just what one image can capture.

Here I carefully selected which galaxies in this densely populated area of the sky to frame, working to grab as many as possible. I was interested in bringing "The Eyes"  (NGC 4438) more into the image, while grabbing NGC 4402 at the top, and NGC 4388 in the lower RH view.  Unfortunately the spherical galaxy M84 is just outside the frame on the RH side, but doing its best to photo bomb the others.  Some notable highlights of the image include:

- M86, an SO galaxy about 51.9 million LY away - mag 8.9
- Copeland's Eyes, NGC 4438, 47.0 million LY distant - mag 10.2
- Copeland's Eyes, NGC 4435, 66.9 million LY distant - mag 10.8
- NGC 4438, 126 million LY - mag 11.2
- NGC 4402, 84.8 million LY - mag 12.9
- NGC 4387, 64.3 million LY - mag 12.1
- NGC 4425, 54.8 million LY - mag 11.8
- NGC 4413, 51.3 million LY - mag 12.3

Our galaxy is estimated to contain 100 to 400 billion stars, with some scientific studies showing it may contain over a trillion stars.  The math becomes staggering indeed:  If an average galaxy contains say 500 billion stars, this image capture alone contains over 63 galaxies (both ID'd and the faint fuzzies). That comes to an estimate of over 31 trillion stars.  Recent estimates are that there may be 2 trillion galaxies in the universe.

What are the chances of life on other worlds?  Well that argument has been active for longer than I've been walking alive on this ball of dirt and water.  My beliefs are perhaps different than yours, however...from a scientific perspective what if we were the only planet with life, and from our planet, we could populate the galaxy and the universe, given enough time?  Somewhere, "someone" has to be the first.  Did you ever consider that possibility?  We could be the spark of life in the universe, being created first!  Just what does the future hold?

[these comments are not intended to spark arguments or controversy, but rather inspire our minds and hearts to wonder]