About our background image:

 

(The photograph at the top of the 'gaiaintro' page is Halley's comet. I took it without magnification in order to show our friends in the Northern Hemisphere what they're missing. The centre of our beautiful galaxy is south of the planet Earth, and these astonishing colours and lush densities of bright stars are forever invisible in the temperate zones of Eurasia and North America. Eat you heart out! ( ;D))

 

 

 

 

 

From NASA's Hubble space telescope in orbit around the Earth.

The image is a core sample from the tiniest speck of our sky. If you turned the Hubble just a fraction of one degree, you'd see the gala continue. Another fraction of a degree, another speck full of galaxies. Every needle hole you could poke in our sky would probably fill up with light, color and motion if you left Hubble's eye on it long enough. When the Baltimore-based Space Telescope Science Institute allocates Hubble's precious orbits to astronomers, a chunk of time is reserved for Director Robert Williams to use at his discretion. When the repaired telescope beamed home astonishing snippets of deep space in 1993, Williams committed nearly 100 hours of viewing time to pushing Hubble's limits. In December 1995 the telescope locked onto a dark patch in the Big Dipper constellation and began accumulating light that is 4 billion times too faint to be seen by human eyes. Williams, a tall and abrupt man, tries to be cool about the resulting image. But when he stands in front of the poster on his office door, he, too, gets a little worked up, although he's more intrigued by the bizarre shapes of the early galaxies -- if the irregular blooms of light are even galaxies. "If I were to sketch out how we got here from the Big Bang, there's a big gap," he says. "We don't know how the galaxies were formed. But when you look at this image, you can see 10 billion years into the past. It's a really remarkable thing. The target marks where Hubble took the Deep Field image. Near the celestial North Star, the spot allowed for long exposures without interference from the Earth, sun or moon. "Look at that," he says, stabbing a fuzzy, violet blob. "What's that? And this. Is this two galaxies colliding? And this? What is this?" He stares silently at the poster as though the force of his curiosity might scare answers up off the paper. Astronomers debate the universe's age, but there's no question the light scattered by these early galaxies has been traveling a long time to reach us, and that the Deep Field is a portrait of our universe as it appeared very early in life. In a sense it's our own baby picture. Later this year, fortified with new instruments, Hubble will study another prick of "empty" sky. And a camera being built for installation in 1999 is designed to look closer at the specks behind the specks behind the specks.  

Who knows how the new photos will change our relationship with the universe? Right now the Hubble Deep Field makes me want to turn off all the lights and join the party.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 For an old wrinkly like me (born in 1950) the Internet is pretty astonishing, and the stuff you can see on the World Wide Web still blows my mind. The above distant galaxy comes to you courtesy of NASA's wonderful Hubble space telecsope. I thought a Hotlink was long overdue. I like to go and get the latest photograph of Mars or Jupiter or one like the above and use it as wallpaper for a while to remind me where we are, and what a wonderful age we live in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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