This is a little piece of an actual photo taken by Hubble and released to the public by NASA on Jan. 5th.

Yah, that’s all “whatever” you say? What is SO COOL about this photo is that this is a photo of the dark part of the sky. If you look at your fingernail and take 1/10th of its size and use that measurement when you look at the darkest part of the night sky – the dark part that looks like there is absolutly nothing there – this is what you’d find: 7,500 galaxies:

Click here for the actual picture – the above is just a little piece of the actual photo.

When you look this deep into space, we are viewing the past… Some of the galaxies in that photo (the red ones) are from just after the “Big Bang”. What you see in the photo is the actual creation of the universe as we know it. It is like looking at the mind of god (in a completely pantheistic way, of course).

<rant> When I hear people say that a god used magic to poof everything into existence so that human life could only exist on this one little planet so that he could reveal himself to a remote, primitive and illiterate desert dwelling people (instead of an advance civilianization like China or Greece) – I want to pull out my hair. That attitude seems to miss that beauty, magnificence and sacred (again meant in a completely pantheistic way) truth of the fleeting immensity of it all. When I look at this stuff, I feel… well, I almost feel rapture.  As Douglas Adams said: “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”</rant>

Anyway, this is a land breaking photo – kinda like the photo we took of the creation of the universe a few years ago by the COBE and WMAP satellites. It gives us a better understanding of the process of assembling galaxies.