After some considerable thought.

[Olly Buckle]

So I looked at the 'First word that comes into your head' game and it went 'constellations' and then it went 'plop'.

It didn't go 'supernova' or 'galaxy', or anything else that had been thought about, it was the first word to come into his mind, poor chap.

Now if someone said 'supernovas' and I thought about it it might strike me that 'Opal fruits' became 'starbursts', and 'Jif' became 'Cif'.

After considerable thought you might come up with a one word response to this, like 'Tosh', or you might have something more amusing to say which takes up a bit more space, like reflections on why 'plop' might have come to mind, but whatever it is, after considerable thought, or at least some reflection, do make a written contribution as seems appropriate

[Foxee]

After some rumination accompanied by a very nice cup of coffee (just cream, thanks, no sugar) I have concluded that your brain may have been channeling the thoughts of a small amphibian who also sees the stars but, alas, is short on English vocabulary. Of course, frogs could and should be expansive in frog-vocabulary and there they have me because I have none. At least none beyond words like 'plop'.

And so consider this further, Olly, my friend, what of stars and galaxies do frogs know and sing about in their frog-language? And isn't it a little unfair that we are left to translate their lyrics by what we observe of the stars ourselves? Or is it the ultimate fairness?

[Olly Buckle]

Do frogs see stars? Not even all men see stars. Some see that when night comes and the Gods spread their blanket on the floor of the great tepee the light from their fire shines through the tiny holes in it. In a similar vein some see the multicoloured supports of the Great Sky Goddess's stilt house when the sun shines through rain. What can we know of stars? A four letter word to describe something of unimaginable heat? Something as dense as a dwarf star. the very ideas are as remote from any reality we could experience as a blanket large enough to cover the world.

[Foxee]

It might be reasonable to suppose, then, that frogs sing of the fire-flies far beyond their reach. The tastiest kind. Maybe a frog-god would be one that could hunt the overhead pools of night.

[Olly Buckle]

Do you know the James Thurber story of the moth that fell in love with a star and was mocked by the other moths for wanting the unobtainable? When they had all died at the candle the moth that was faithful to its unobtainable love lived to see the day.
there is a line Chrissy Hines uses, though I have heard it elsewhere as well, 'All of us are living in the gutter, some of us are looking at the stars.'

Water and light, everything alive depends on them ultimately, gutters and stars.

[SueC]

Constellations -----> Star-spangled

[Olly Buckle]

Last week my computer start up picture kept coming up with a picture from the Hubble telescope of a galaxy that is a hundred and fifty million light years away; the light that left that galaxy left it a hundred and fifty million years ago. Well give or take a bit, they say the galaxy is several thousand light years across so it can't have all left at the same time.

Hubble orbits at about 559 kilometres above the earth, that was a terrific achievement, getting a big telescope up there, putting it all together, working with the technology to point it where we want, and send all the information back to earth; 559 kilometres away.

The speed of light is approximately 300,000 kilometres per second, there are 31,557,600 seconds in a year, so if you multiply that by three hundred thousand you get the distance in a light year, 9,467,280,000,000, in kilometres. times that by a hundred and fifty million and that is how far away that galaxy is

However, if you found a way to travel that far you wouldn't find the galaxy, because the universe is expanding. That's where that galaxy was a hundred and fifty million years ago when the light left it.

My contention is that those numbers are so huge the human mind can not contain them as any sort of real thing, we can make a model, talk in hundreds of millions, but it is hard for me to think about the kilometre down to the station as one connected thing, I have to think about the things I go past one by one, 'And then there's the straight bit and the house where the work is being done, now is the house with the van parked outside before or after that?'

No, It is all just too unreal, I am off down the garden to dig over a few three hundred thousandths of a light second.

[TheMightyAz]

So I looked at the 'First word that comes into your head' game and it went 'constellations' and then it went 'plop'.

It didn't go 'supernova' or 'galaxy', or anything else that had been thought about, it was the first word to come into his mind, poor chap.

Now if someone said 'supernovas' and I thought about it it might strike me that 'Opal fruits' became 'starbursts', and 'Jif' became 'Cif'.

After considerable thought you might come up with a one word response to this, like 'Tosh', or you might have something more amusing to say which takes up a bit more space, like reflections on why 'plop' might have come to mind, but whatever it is, after considerable thought, or at least some reflection, do make a written contribution as seems appropriate

Aint nothing wrong with 'plop'! It's a marvellous word.

[Bloggsworth]

Do you know the James Thurber story of the moth that fell in love with a star and was mocked by the other moths for wanting the unobtainable? When they had all died at the candle the moth that was faithful to its unobtainable love lived to see the day.
there is a line Chrissy Hines uses, though I have heard it elsewhere as well, 'All of us are living in the gutter, some of us are looking at the stars.'

Water and light, everything alive depends on them ultimately, gutters and stars.

Oscar Wilde, who else.

[bazz cargo]

Plop I say...
I, as a pedant, am bound by tradition to point out that this was not a word association game. My effort would have been even more random. I should also point out that Plop! is the title of one of the funniest books I have read.

So I looked at the 'First word that comes into your head' game and it went 'constellations' and then it went 'plop'.

It didn't go 'supernova' or 'galaxy', or anything else that had been thought about, it was the first word to come into his mind, poor chap.

Now if someone said 'supernovas' and I thought about it it might strike me that 'Opal fruits' became 'starbursts', and 'Jif' became 'Cif'.

After considerable thought you might come up with a one word response to this, like 'Tosh', or you might have something more amusing to say which takes up a bit more space, like reflections on why 'plop' might have come to mind, but whatever it is, after considerable thought, or at least some reflection, do make a written contribution as seems appropriate