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Most of what you see during a typical night of skygazing – the Moon, the planets and constellations – is located in a small remote corner of the galaxy. Practically all of the naked-eye stars are located within a mere 2,000 light years from the Earth. This may seem a large enough distance (each light year about 6,000,000,000,000 miles long) until one considers that the distance between us and the center of our galaxy is over 30,000 light years. The vast distances beyond our little section of the galaxy swallow up light so effectively that if all incoming light originating from the nearest 2,000 light years was blocked out, only the glow of the Milky Way and few other randomly placed cloudy patches would be visible to us at all.
Most stargazers are willing to settle for the Moon, planets, asteroid, comets, meteors, aurora, eclipses and the constellations – all close enough to be seen with a small pair of binoculars. For others, these are not enough and they search for deep-sky objects. These distant objects may be cluster of stars, clouds of gases or even entire galaxies. A skygazing looking at a deep-sky object is seeing beyond the neighborhood into the outer limits of space.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable
end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small
unregarded yellow sun.
Douglas Adams (1952-2001) The Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy