Hey, I feel like one of those milk bottles in a carnival!

You know when they stand the milk bottles up and guys come along to show off to their girls and throw baseballs at the milk bottles?

Watching this little movie makes me feel like someone is tossing baseballs at us! What movie? Give me a moment. See, an asteroid - a mile-wide chunk of rock and metal - just hurtled past Earth missing us by "only" 2 million miles. I say " only" because that's damned close as these things go. But to put it into perspective, the moon, which is far, far larger, is about eight times closer. So don't get too excited.

Still, if something like this ever hit us, believe me, it would blow over a heck of a lot of milk bottles!

But that said, what got me excited was this neat little movie made by Robert Long of Vado, New Mexico and published on Spaceweather.com today. Why I love it, is the movie shows stars in our galaxy - most of them probably within about 30,000 light years of us. and it shows a pair of wonderful galaxies known as M81 and M82 that are somewhere in the neighborhgood of 8-to-12 million light years from us.

So the little movie does several things. First it shows how something incrediblty small - about one mile across - can look like something incredibly big, such as a star, except for the fact that we can see its motion over a relatively short time frame - a dead giveaway as to how close it is. And of course the stars are nothing in comparison to the size of the galaxies shown.

So for all those reasons, I think this little movie - yes, this is the link to it - is worth watching and meditating about. The one faint light that moves in this is the asteroid. The movie is several frames taken over the cousre of an hour or so, then spliced together to make a movie that lasts less than aminute.