(02-09-2014, 09:53 AM)My Alter Ego Wrote: Cool! John, you have varied interests, don't you?
I find some of the Hubble photographs fascinating. Like Himm2 suggests, it's all very humbling.
The most distant galaxies are the red ones, especially some that are really hard to see. Since the distances are so great a photograph like this one is like a time machine. We can see many galaxies that are "small" and weakly organized (e.g. not big crisp spirals) where the light was emitted at a time far before our solar system existed. Some of these deep space images also include strange phenomenon like gravitational lensing where the galaxy is only visible because the light has been magnified as it passed through a strong gravity field. The magnification is caused by the bending of spacetime as predicted by Einstein's theories.
There is a beauty in all that (that is way beyond my comprehension). It gets into a spiritual realm.