Feeling small in the bigger picture!

Having a look through some of the sites I trawl, photographic sites, football sites and current interest in astronomical sites (due to Lee and I currently studying a short course with the OU on the subject of Orion) i found this piece on the Hubble telescope site about a panoramic photograph taken of the Andromeda galaxy.

Reading through the article, it made me feel very small in this enormous universe we inhabit. This panoramic photograph has been stitched together from over 7000 exposures, showing over 100 million stars.

In this cropped version of the image, it would take 48000 light years to travel from left to right. So if we look at a light year as the distance light travels in one earth year we get to a total of.....

Nine trillion, four hundred and sixty billion, eight hundred million kilometers in one year. Therefore when you then times that total by 48000, we have to be looking at the biggest panorama ever produced.

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2015/02/image/a/

A zoomable version of the photo is available from the hubble site, in various sizes and qualities.