In perhaps an unintended degree of verisimilitude to the actual shuttle launch experience, a lot of the time on the Shuttle Launch Experience ride is spent waiting. As you wait on the gantry, monitors show a video where former astronauts describe what it was like for them to fly on the shuttle.
The galaxy we live in, called the Milky Way Galaxy, is a barred spiral galaxy composed of at least 100 billion stars. It is approximately 100,000 light years across and about 1000 light years thick. It has a central bulge that is about 10,000 light years in diameter.
About the Image. The Large and Small Magellanic clouds were thought to be the closest galaxies to ours, until 1994, when the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy (SagDEG) was discovered. In 2003, the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy was discovered - this is now the closest known galaxy to ours! The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and its apparent neighbor and relative, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), are conspicuous objects in the southern hemisphere sky, though they are no longer the closest galaxies to ours.