Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is illustrated on the right.

If you could count the stars in our galaxy, at a rate of one per second, it would take you 9,500 years (that's 300 billion stars). The Milky Way is just one of hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars.

The diameter of the Milky Way is 100,000 light years.

The next nearest galaxy to the Milky Way is the Andromeda galaxy: 2,500,000 light years away.

The Hubble Space Telescope took this image of the Whirlpool galaxy (see right). This galaxy is one of the most distant observed galaxies: 23 million light years away.

The Hubble space telescope then zoomed in to see what was at the centre of the Whirlpool galaxy.

Some consider this to be an amazing image of a cross ... others think that there are two dust rings around a black hole ...

Psalm 8 : 3-4 "When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?"

Job 38 : 31 "Can you bind the beautiful Pleiades? Can you loose the cords of Orion?"

Pleiades (or "The Seven Sisters") and Orion are two star constellations. In this verse, God is talking with Job and asking whether Job can control the stars as God can. The stars of the constellations - and the whole Universe - are in God's hands.