Revealing the Universe - check this out.

[thesummerqueen]

This brings tears to my eyes.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badast...eep-field/

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have created the deepest multi-color* image of the Universe ever taken: the Hubble Extreme Deep Field, a mind-blowing glimpse into the vast stretches of our cosmos.

Hit this link for the full view:
http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/arc...c1214a.jpg

The variety of galaxies is amazing. Some look like relatively normal spirals and ellipticals, but you can see some that are clearly distorted due to interactions – collisions on a galactic scale! – and others that look like galaxy fragments. These may very well be baby galaxies caught in the act of forming, growing. The most distant objects here are over 13 billion light years away, and we see them when they were only 500 million years old.

In case your head is not asplodey from all this, I’ll note that the faintest objects in this picture are at 31st magnitude: the faintest star you can see with your naked eye is ten billion times brighter.
So, yeah.

I’ll note that the purpose of this and the other deep field images is to look as far away and as far back in time as we can to see what the Universe was like when it was young. The wealth of data and scientific knowledge here cannot be overstated.

But I suspect, in the long run, the importance of this and the other pictures will be their impact on the public consciousness. We humans, our planet, our Sun, our galaxy, are so small as to be impossible to describe on this sort of scale, and that’s a good perspective to have.

But never forget: we figured this out. Our curiosity led us to build bigger and better telescopes, to design computers and mathematics to analyze the images from those devices, and to better understand the Universe we live in.

And I wanted to separate out this bit, because it's the most important.

And it all started with simply looking up. Always look up, every chance you get. There’s a whole Universe out there waiting to be explored.