This engraving is from a nice article in Seed Magazine.  I like the idea of sticking one’s head through the outer spherical shell of stars and finding…. well, it looks like this guy found heaven.

The article linked above begins by talking about big numbers and how we’re kind of incapable of having an intuition about them.  It then asks us to consider this:

We live in a universe so large that light itself (and nothing goes faster) takes years to travel between stars, eons to travel between galaxies. All we see in the sky are essentially old photos of celestial objects as they were when their light first left to travel to Earth. When we look across space, we also look back in time.

Isn’t that an incredible thought?  That anything we look at is what it used to look like.  It’s like this for all things we know of.  Take the sun: we are only seeing what happened eight minutes before, so the sun could die and we would only find out eight minutes later.  Or when a friend has a new look, you know you’re seeing her old style because what you’re seeing happened about .00000067 seconds ago (if you’re 2 meters apart).

There are more interesting ideas in the article… It’s a good read.

Besides the article, there are some amazing photos linked in it.  See two of them below.  The first is Andromeda — a galaxy that seems much like our galaxy, the Milky Way.