Known as the Witch’s Broom, the Western Veil Nebula is part of a huge supernova remnant that stretches more than six moon widths across the night sky.
Astronomers have used all sorts of tricks over the years to try to convey the mind-boggling scale of the universe to us ordinary folks. If you could drive your car from here to the nearest star at 60 m.p.h., they’ve told us, it would take 11 million years. If the Sun were a beach ball sitting on a football field’s goal line, the Earth would be a pea on the 50-yard line. And so on.
Things got a little more sophisticated with the extraordinary 1968 film Powers of Ten, which zooms out from a bucolic scene in a Chicago park to encompass ever-wider panoramas until it captures an artist’s rendering of the entire visible universe, then zooms back down into the hand of a sun-bather lying on the grass, probing the ever-tinier world of the microscopic, atomic and subatomic.
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