Shards.................................

“If I wholly unleash my imagination and forcefully stretch it out beyond its own edges, even at such a point I can only imagine a thin shard of this most immense God.  And even though it is but a thin shard, it will nonetheless be mesmerizingly colossal.” 


-Craig D. Lounsbrough

enlargeable image, and guess at what it is, here

Mystical..........................

"The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical.  It is the sower of all true science.  [The person] to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.  To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness."

-Albert Einstein

image via

How confident are you....................

.................................that you truly understand the big picture?

Color me clueless.

photos via APOD

Unfinished masterpiece........

via

Sure is a lot going on out there..........

Explanation: Massive stars lie within NGC 6357, an expansive emission nebula complex some 6,500 light-years away toward the tail of the constellation Scorpius. In fact, positioned near centerin this ground-based close-up of NGC 6357, star cluster Pismis 24 includes some of the most massive stars known in the galaxy, stars with nearly 100 times the mass of the Sun. The nebula's bright central region also contains dusty pillars of molecular gas, likely hiding massive protostars from the prying eyes of optical instruments. Intricate shapes in the nebula are carved as interstellar winds and energetic radiation from the young and newly forming massive stars clear out the natal gas and dust and power the nebular glow. Enhancing the nebula's cavernous appearance, narrowband image data was included in this composite color image in a Hubble palette scheme. Emission from sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms is shown in red green and blue hues. The alluring telescopic view spans about 50 light-years at the estimated distance of NGC 6357.

Explanation: Sometimes even the dark dust of interstellar space has a serene beauty. One such place occurs toward the constellation of Taurus. The filaments featured here can be found on thesky between the Pleiades star cluster and the California Nebula. This dust is not known not for its bright glow but for its absorption and opaqueness. Several bright stars are visible with their blue light seen reflecting off the brown dust. Other stars appear unusually red as their light barely peaks through a column of dark dust, with red the color that remains after the blue is scattered away. Yet other stars are behind dust pillars so thick they are not visible here. Although appearing serene, the scene is actually an ongoing loop of tumult and rebirth. This is because massive enough knots of gas and dust will gravitationally collapse to form new stars -- stars that both create new dust in their atmospheres and destroy old dust with their energetic light and winds.

via

Ungraspable.......................

The tiny particles which form the vast
universe are not tiny at all.
Neither is the vast universe vast.
These are notions of the mind,
which is like a knife, always
chipping away at the Tao, trying
to render it graspable
and manageable.

But that which is beyond form is
ungraspable, and that which is
beyond knowing is unmanageable.
There is, however, this consolation:
She who lets go of the knife will find
the Tao at her fingertips.

-Hua Hu Ching:  The Unknown Teachings of Lao Tzu
Brian Browne Walker

image via

Mysteries............................

Enlargeable photo here and here.  As a bonus, explanations of sorts are included.

Magnificence.............................

“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?' Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.” 
-Carl Sagan

enlargable photo and back story here

Sing.................................................

via mme scherzo

On Dark Doodads................................

There sure is a lot of stuff out there is space...............

Enlargeable  photo and official description here.  

Wiki on "dark doodad" here.

And the question was asked..............................

"How much should we know?"

and the answer gently drifted by.............................

"Not so much."

Explanation: The 16th century Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan and his crew had plenty of time to study the southern sky during the first circumnavigation of planet Earth. As a result, two fuzzy cloud-like objects easily visible to southern hemisphere skygazers are known as the Clouds of Magellan, now understood to be satellite galaxies of our much larger, spiral Milky Way galaxy. About 160,000 light-years distant in the constellation Dorado, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is seen here in a remarkably deep, colorful, image. Spanning about 15,000 light-years or so, it is the most massive of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies and is the home of the closest supernova in modern times, SN 1987A. The prominent patch below center is 30 Doradus, also known as the magnificent Tarantula Nebula, is a giant star-forming region about 1,000 light-years across.

Source, and enlargeable photo. is here.  I love how their explanations just raise so many more questions.  God love the explorers.

Awe........................................

“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought!  The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?”  Instead they say, “No, no, no!  My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.”  A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.” 
-Carl Sagan

image (enlargable with description) via

Awe.............................................

"The aforementioned Paul Pearsall, inventor of 'openture,' spent a large part of his life waging a lonely battle of which John Keats would surely have approved:  to get the concept of 'awe' accepted by the psychological establishment as one of the primary human emotions, alongside such standards as love, joy, anger, fear, sadness.  'Unlike all the other emotions,' he argued, awe 'is all of our feelings rolled up into one intense one.  You can't peg it just happy, sad, afraid, angry, or hopeful.  Instead, it's a matter of experiencing all these feelings and yet, paradoxically, experiencing no clearly identifiable, or at least any easily describable, emotion.'  Awe, he writes, 'is like trying to assemble a complex jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing.  There's never any closure in an awe-inspiring life, only constant acceptance of the mysteries of life.  We're never allowed to know when this fantastic voyage might end ... but that's part of the life-disorienting chaos that makes this choice so thrillingly difficult.'"
-Oliver Burkeman,  The Antidote:  Happiness For People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

Awe. The unexpected universe.........................?

Explanation: Long ago, far away, a star exploded. Supernova 1994D, visible as the bright spot on the lower left, occurred in the outskirts of disk galaxy NGC 4526. Supernova 1994D was not of interest for how different it was, but rather for how similar it was to other supernovae. In fact, the light emitted during the weeks after its explosion caused it to be given the familiar designation of a Type Ia supernova. If all Type 1a supernovae have the same intrinsic brightness, then the dimmer a supernova appears, the farther away it must be. By calibrating a precise brightness-distance relation, astronomers are able to estimate not only the expansion rate of the universe (parameterized by the Hubble Constant), but also the geometry of the universe we live in (parameterized by Omega and Lambda). The large number and great distances to supernovae measured over the past few years, when combined with other observations, are interpreted as indicating that we live in a previously unexpected universe.

via (including much larger photo)

Mother Nature....................................

..........................................................is one tough mother.

“Just leave a natural system alone, and amazing things happen,”
-as excerpted from this post on the après-eruption recovery at Mount St. Helens.

May 18, 1980

about now

Let us celebrate one of the great....................

......................................................accomplishments of our time:   The 25th Anniversary of the Hubble Telescope.  Faithful readers of this blog can attest to my fascination with the APOD site.  The Hubble Telescope is a major contributor.  If you share my awe and wonder, please check this out.

Leviathan..............................

“Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it, and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic.” 
-Herman Melville

You might think this is a close-up snap-shot of.......

......................Kurt's grilling-ready charcoal, but actually it is a photo of the rarely-seen center of our very own Milky Way galaxy:

People, can you get your mind around the notion that, according to scientists' estimates, there are 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe - and,  "the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy some 100,000–120,000 light-years in diameter which contains 100–400 billion stars. It may contain at least as many planets as well."?  The mind reels.

larger photo and description is here

We just don't make things the way they used to....

The Licking County Courthouse, built in 1878 for $190,000.

Unanswerable......................................

photo via         cartoon via