Monday, 24 August 2009

To Infinity And Beyond

Learning about Space at school was captivating, I think part of this is a realisation that the world which we felt that was so large was in fact a tiny speck within the Universe. We are not one of 10 or 20 planets, 1,000 or even one of a million...in fact we are one of an unlimited and unknown number of planets that exist. This is hard for us to comprehend and the idea that we have only discovered such a small percentage of what is actually out there is mind blowing. Although most of us have a curious fascination about life beyond our planet few of us ever develop this into our careers and continue this discovery, however I am grateful for those that do. Recently we just celebrated the 40th anniversary of the day man stepped foot on the Moon, which was an amazing feat of space science. However since this moment so many more experiments and and investigations have led to new discoveries of Space and although none of them involve stepping foot on another planet we have found new corners of the universe which we didn't know existed, planets appearing in our solar system, black holes & milkways and so much more, the continuing investigations are fascinating.

I thought I would let you know about this link I found on NASA's website, Astronomy Picture of the Day. Each day a new photograph/ image/ video is put up with an explination from professional Astronomers and each day the next image is even more enthralling than the one before. Some of the images seem so unreal as if they were created for a movie screen rather than are the result of a natural occurrence. Also it seems bizarre that some of these images are of stars that no longer exist or of events that occurred thousands of years before we were even born but the images took this long to reach us even with the speed of light because they are so far away. The whole concept is mind blowing and even though I am no longer at school I am still as curious and equally as captivated by the images I see coming from Space and I feel the same excitement I had as a kid by what i see.

This shows brilliantly how the sky changes as the earth revolves



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