When we look at the Milky Way, we see that the stars of the universe seem to have created a cluster that has some kind of structure. Herschel made a superhuman effort in counting stars in an attempt to identify this structure of our galaxy. In most cases, the contents of clusters in the natural world are homogeneously scat- tered. Therefore, Herschel assumed the stars also would exist uniformly with almost the same density in the cluster. Assuming in addition that all stars had the same brightness and were evenly scattered about the galaxy, Herschel postulated that the more stars he counted in a given block of space, the farther away those stars had to be. Think of it this way: Van Gogh used many small dots to paint his famous self-portrait. If you stood really close to that painting and looked at only 1 square inch of it, you would only be able to see a few points. But if you backed up a few feet, then looked at 1 square inch of the painting, you would see more points. In fact, it would be hard to distinguish the separate points from that distance. So for Herschel, the more stars that were in his "1 square inch," the farther away he was from those stars. After this enormous effort, Herschel created the model of the universe shown in the figure below. Sun