Alt text:
If you live in Los Angeles (around 33°52'N, roughly the latitude of Hermosa Beach) the black hole in V404 Cygni passes over you each day. On Christmas Day it will be directly overhead around 2pm.
this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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As per the Planet-building show room on Magrathea, it's big things that help me recognize the magnitude of the universe around us (or rather our infinitesimal presence in it). I have a 12K x 12K image of the sun (our astronomical societies take them daily) that I look at the details of when I want to be reminded how teeny tiny I am. (The sun alone is 99.8% of the mass of the solar system.)
And there are stars hundreds of times more massive.