"O Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder,
Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed."
The lyrics of that song came to mind as I viewed the following photograph. Just pretty amazing. In fact, it's now my desktop wallpaper. You can
get your own hi-res copy here.
For those of you who don't want to
click through to the Bad Astronomy article (I
highly recommend reading it), it's a picture from the Hubble telescope. You know how you go outside on a dark night and look up and see all those stars, and then you keep looking at one spot for a few seconds and more stars appear? Well, this is sorta like that. They pointed Hubble at an "empty" area of space and let it gather in light for 48 hours. 48 hours! How long can you keep your eyes open? Anyway, what Hubble was able to capture is light from galaxies 13 Billion light-years away! The article says that some of the light from these galaxies is "only" 600 million years after the Big Bang.
Oh, yeah, one more thing. The width of this picture only covers about 1/15th the width of a full moon. It would take 30 million of these pictures to cover the entire sky!
"Thy power throughout the universe displayed" indeed.
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