Wonder F. The Hubble Deep Field. In 1996 astronomers pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at the sky and opened the shutter. I let the writers at Astronomy Picture of the Day tell the story:
“Galaxies like colorful pieces of candy fill the Hubble Deep Field – one of humanity’s most distant optical views of the Universe. The dimmest…are very distant galaxies and represent what the Universe looked like in the extreme past, perhaps less than one billion years after the Big Bang. To make the Deep Field image, astronomers selected an uncluttered area of the sky and…pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at a single spot for 10 days accumulating and combining many separate exposures.”
I experience vertigo as I look at this image, and alternate between wonder and terror as I contemplate it. Whatever plan God has for the Universe, surely it involves more than just planet Earth and its inhabitants.