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by aperiodic 3988 days ago
It is exactly that: Pluto is a very tiny astronomical object. Galaxies, nebulae, and such are much further away than Pluto, but that is more than made up for by how mind-boggingly large they are. For example, The Andromeda Galaxy is about six full moons wide as viewed from Earth[1].

[1]: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/01/01/moon_and...

2 comments

It's amazing. It almost makes me feel sick to realize how large it would appear, despite how unimaginably far away it is. It simply does not compute.
There are an estimated 1 trillion stars in the Andromeda galaxy.
It's kind of a shame humanity evolved in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way.

If we'd evolved in one of the Magellanic Clouds, we'd see an astounding squashed spiral view of this galaxy with direct line of sight of the bright nucleus.

Meanwhile if there are life forms in Magellanic Clouds they are probably looking at the spiral arms thinking that it is a shame that they did not evolve in a galaxy proper...