The universe is a big place. (By definition, the universe is everything there is!) Our Milky Way Galaxy is more than one billion billion kilometers, or 120,000 light years, in diameter. And it's only an average-size galaxy in a universe containing billions of galaxies! Your team of astronomers recommends a two-prong approach to the task of searching the skies for signals from extraterrestrials: 1) A comprehensive sky survey. To cover the entire sky, you'll have to use telescopes with a wide field of view, which means they won't be very sensitive to weak signals. 2) A targeted search. Using very sensitive telescopes, you can focus on a select number of stars which seem most likely to harbor intelligent life. But the universe is a big place. Do you want to start looking inside our Milky Way, and if so, where exactly? Or do you want to search in another galaxy, such as Andromeda? Milky Way's nucleus In the Earth's neighborhood Andromeda Galaxy

© 1998 SETI Institute and Educational Web Adventures Galaxies in deep space/Hubble Deep Field image courtesy Space Telescope Science Institute NGC 2997 image © Anglo-Australian Observatory/Photograph by David Malin Andromeda image © Jason Ware Comments to SETI Education