Occasionally I get asked why I chose the name "Speck", perhaps this may better answer the question.

Betelgeuse is a red giant star (sometimes called a red supergiant) in the constellation of Orion, you can see it with the naked eye on a clear night. It's the red dot on the left shoulder of Orion.

Easy to spot, easier still if you have the excellent Stellarium app which is free to use but has optional paid upgrades.

Stellarium will NOT recommend a cinema where you can go and watch the Beetlejuice movies, that's a totally different universe!

We're likely to see Betelgeuse change quite drastically in the near future, you see it exploded, quite some time ago.

Here's where my name starts to sneak into the story.

Betelgeuse is big, really big, really exceptionally big.

If you swapped it for our sun we'd be dead, in fact we'd be deep inside it.

Even Jupiter, so very far away from our sun might well be swallowed up.

* Sometimes the size of things is hard to comprehend even when they are relatively close by.

Betelgeuse actually exploded a while back, quite a while back, quite a hell of a while back.

It exploded around 650 million years ago, the Earth was likely in the middle of an ice age at the time.

* Sometimes things are so distant in time, we can't quite even get a feel for how long ago something happened.

Betelgeuse is around 650 million miles away.
Fortunately for planet Earth that distance from Betelgeuse means we exist.

* Sometimes the impact of an event such as an explosion is hard to wrap your head around without some point of reference.

At this time I'm compelled to slide in a quote from one of my favourite authors:

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

By the time we see this explosion around 650 million years will have passed.

Because we see light, and light only goes so fast - a mere 3 million meters a second or 186 miles a second or 671 million miles an hour, we can almost get a grip on those numbers, almost.

When we do see it, it will be spectacular and for a long time.
It will probably be as bright as the moon, even likely to be visible in daytime.

So dear reader, if you read this far - well done, I've droned on a lot.
More importantly at least to me is to know what I am in all this majesty of physics, of time and of space.

What else could I be but "speck" :)

Take care of yourselves and each other as we all cling to this fragile rock in the cold of space, it's really the only thing we deserve to be proud of.

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