Step 1: Wait for a clear night. If light pollution is bad where you live, find a more isolated area. The more stars you can see, the better.

Step 2: Go outside and find a nice area to lie down.

Step 3: Smoke a bowl or two, and/or have a few drinks. (this step is optional, but highly recommended for best results)

Step 4: Lie the fuck down.

Step 5: Stare at the stars and ponder the following facts:


- You are lying on the very edge of a massive, spherical celestial body, like a speck of dust on a billiard ball. Except the earth, if shrank down to the same size, would actually be smoother than a billiard ball.

- This sphere is constantly spinning. It's also flying through the cosmos at 18.5 miles per second. You are, at this moment, riding a planet through space faster than your mind can comprehend. I swear if you focus on this long enough, simply lying down feels like an amusement park ride.

- I think most people look at the sky and see a sort of "ceiling" to the earth, but that's not the case. You're staring straight into a dark, cold, massive abyss, and the only thing keeping you from "falling" into it is the earth's gravity.

- Every star you can see is tens, hundreds, even thousands of light years away from you -- yet even at this massive distance, they're relatively close. Every single one of them resides in our own Milky Way galaxy. One of about 170,000,000,000 galaxies in the observable universe, containing around 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. Feel small yet?

- This is my favorite bit: the light you see from each star is as old as its distance from the earth. If you're looking at a star that's 500 light years away, you're seeing it because a stream of photons were emitted from the star 500 years ago exactly in your direction. And once those photons hit your eye, they're converted into electrical energy. They disappear, ending their journey across the galaxy by giving you the ability to see the star they emerged from, possibly before you even existed.


Seriously, get off the computer and stare at the stars one of these nights. It's fucking amazing.

yes, it's fucking amazing. but, there's no isolated are around my house. now, i'm only can watch a star trough internet, photos, etc. by the way, if earth arounding the sun (in this case revolution) so slowly, our earth will collapsing with the sun. then BOOM. and by the way, i'm interested to science. include astronomy and chemistry. but, i'm still a pre-junior. XD. (sorry if my english is bad. i'm indonesian).

Quote from Lethal2

I don't understand what you're saying xD

Why the fuck would you bump this thread just to say this? Nothing I said was all that complicated.

Hell yeah it's amazing. It'd probably be way better high though.

Too bad.

I dunno if it can be considered bumping since this section is pretty much dead anyway. This was on the first page.

I'll go through his posts later to see if they're all equally as worthless as this one, if they are it might be considered disruptive behavior or even minor spam.

Here's another thing to do while looking at the stars:



When you look at the sky, don't look at it as if the stars are a ceiling. The bright stars in the sky are closer to you, and the dim ones are further away. Once you realize this, the sky suddenly becomes 3D, and it really looks like you're staring into an endless void.

Imagine how an astrophysicist will think sitting under the stars.

Heh, he'd probably be plotting the flight path you'd need to take to get a rocket from Earth to each star ;)

Quote from Hewitt

He's been pointlessly necro-ing these Science threads for the past 12 hours now.

That's hate speech!
Also, this seems like something I should be doing right now instead of writing this. Oh well, too late to go back now.