I’ve always been in awe of the heavens above me on a dark, clear night. The majesty of the brilliant points of light that make up the starry canopy above our planet is enough to take your breath away, if you pause long enough to appreciate it. Try to count the visible starts in the night sky. If you are far enough away from city lights, the task soon becomes impossible as you lose your place while finding dimmer objects in between the brighter ones.

It’s been said many times, and in many ways, that space – our universe – is large. “Large”, however, doesn’t even scratch the surface. Think again about your star counting exercise and how futile it is. Now imagine the same task using a telescope. The magnified sky will reveal many more stars, even if you are just using a simple, backyard hobbyist telescope.

Now let’s bring in the big dog – the Hubble Space Telescope. For nearly three decades now, the Hubble has been in orbit around Earth, relentlessly peering into the inky blackness of space and sending back every scrap of data it can glean. The images have been both mesmerizing and daunting. From our position here on the ground, the pictures of stars, and even galaxies, countless light years distant are difficult to imagine as reality, but real they are.

Just about the time I had finally resigned myself to accepting the stuff the Hubble has been sending back as “cool stuff I won’t understand”, along came the Hubble Legacy Field.

http://hubblesite.org/image/4492/news

The folks that run the Hubble Space Telescope at NASA have apparently bent themselves on the task of completely blowing all our minds. They have succeeded, at least with me. The link above will take you to a most remarkable website with an incredible picture you can download for free. Do it. Go ahead. (Get the full resolution version – don’t waste your time looking at the low-resolution copy at the top of this article.) While you are at it, do a web search and get yourself a free copy of the image processing software, Gimp. You’ll need it to properly view the image. When you open the picture and zoom in, you will see increasing numbers of spots and shapes. Don’t bother counting. There are about 250,000 of them. (NASA counted them for us.)

Let’s talk about what all those spots and shapes are. The entire image you see in that picture covers an area of the sky about the same size as the full moon. It’s just a small region. Thanks to the Hubble’s extraordinary ability to see great distances, its depth is extraordinary – about 13.5 billion light years. Yes, billion – with a “b”. That means that if you zoom all the way into the image, the faintest lights you see started on their journey to Earth over 13,500,000,000 years ago. If that’s not enough to cramp your cranium, think about this. All the objects you see are not stars. No, that would be incredible enough, but your brain would probably be OK with it. They are galaxies. Each of the galaxies shown in the photo are, in turn, comprised of billions, maybe even trillions, of stars.

Think about it this way. I live in Knoxville, Tennessee. It’s a mid-size town. It feels like a pretty big space to me, at least compared to my own house on my own lawn. Let’s expand that thought to all of Knox County. That’s a little bigger. It would take a little while to drive across it. I certainly wouldn’t want to walk that far. Next step – the state of Tennessee. We’re talking about a serious jaunt to cross all of that, especially if we go east to west. Don’t stop there. Think now about the country, the North American continent, the hemisphere, and the planet. It starts to make your feel pretty small, right? Well, we’ve only just begun. Our planet is a small clump of mud and rock whipping around a pretty ordinary star we call our sun. Other planets share this star. We can see some of them in that night sky we talked about way up in the first paragraph. The biggest one is Jupiter. It’s 11.2 times as fat as little old Earth, but only 10% of the diameter of the sun.

Feeling teeny yet?

Now think about this. There are literally hundreds of millions of “suns” in the Milky Way galaxy, the galaxy we call home. Lots of them have orbiting planets. There could easily be multiple billions of planets in our galaxy alone. Multiply those stars and planets by 250,000 and try to image all of that in a space covering a moon-sized circle in the sky. Then, multiply that by how many times you would have to copy/paste the image of the moon to cover up the entire canopy surrounding our planet. While you’re still putting out the brain fires generated by trying to get a grip on that concept, know that the Hubble may not be seeing the actual fringes of our universe. There could be (and probably are) more galaxies beyond the reach of the Hubble’s gaze.

Then there’s the whole concept of multiple universes to deal with. What if ours isn’t the only one?

I am a person of faith. I believe that all we see, as well as all we cannot see, is the work of an all-powerful and loving Creator. The more I learn about the universe in which we live, the more I am convinced of this. In the 17th century, Blaise Pascal entertained such thoughts as those the Hubble Space Telescope has brought to mind in the 21st century. (Pascal was a bit ahead of his time.) I’ll close this week’s article with a quote from his prodigious mind.

“Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her full and grand majesty and turn his vision from the low objects which surround him. Let him gaze on that brilliant light, set like an eternal lamp to illumine the universe; let the earth appear to him a point in comparison with the vast circle described by the sun; and let him wonder at the fact that this vast circle is itself but a very fine point in comparison with that described by the stars in their revolution round the firmament. But if our view be arrested there, let our imagination pass beyond; it will sooner exhaust the power of conception than nature that of supplying material for conception. The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. In short it is the greatest sensible mark of the almighty power of God, that imagination loses itself in that thought.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

This article was written by Tilmer Wright, Jr. Tilmer is an IT professional with over thirty years of experience wrestling with technology. He’s also a proud member of the Authors Guild of Tennessee. His second novel, The Bit Dance is a cautionary tale about what can happen when technology runs away from its creators. You can find links to Tilmer’s books at the following location: https://www.amazon.com/Tilmer-Wright/e/B00DVKGG4K%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_s…

His author information website is here: http://www.tilmerwrightjr.com/

The picture of the Hubble Legacy Field is provided in the public domain by NASA. You may follow the link in the article above for more information and to download the full resolution image.