Today we pondered how we measure the number of galaxies in the Universe, which led us to the Cosmic web, creating a Deep Field image and what counts as a galaxy?
When is a collection of stars just a collection of stars and when is it a galaxy? It's an actual scientific question that the astronomy community is struggling over.
We visited the Parallax effect as a way of measuring the distance to nearby stars, and investigated Henrietta Swan Leavitt's discovery of the relationship between the period and luminosity for classical Cepheids in 1908.
More up to date we compared the Hubble Telescope with its replacement, the Nancy Gracey Roman Space Telescope which will study Dark Energy, exoplanets and use coronagraph technology which will test new technologies for space-based planet hunting. The mission aims to photograph worlds and dusty disks around nearby stars with detail up to a thousand times better than possible with other observatories.