The Space Shuttle Endeavor is being decommissioned, and prepared for her final resting place at the California Space Center. Here she is docked at the International Space Station on May 28th, 2011, during her final mission. For extra poignancy, listen to The Last Watch by Stan Rogers while viewing this picture full-sized, or reading about Endeavor's 19 years of service.
I started this post the other morning after getting only 3 1/2 hours sleep, and then abandoned it when it became obvious that I had all the mental capacity of a senile mouse. However, the urge to blog stayed with me, so I left all associated tabs open. And glad I did, because I ran across something else online that I wanted to add to the post. Also, because I currently have the attention-span of a hummingbird's heart beat.
But I will get to that new addition at a later point. For now, here is the gist of the post; space, as my college friend Isaac was wont to say, is big. Now, Isaac was actually referring to mere intra-system distances (specifically cislunar with regard to the L-1 and L-2 Lagrange points, and the scale of your average O'Neill Cylinder), but the sentiment becomes even greater the farther one travels from Earth.
Now, this comic reminded me that astronomers had recently completed the largest 3D model of the Universe from data collected during the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. In boring old 2D, that model looks like this picture:
Neat to look at, but it doesn't really give a body a sense of scale, does it? For that, we need to go with something like this image:
Centered on the Virgo Supercluster (wherein our very own Milky Way resides), with a scale of about 1cm = 1 Billion lightyears, this picture uses information from earlier SDSS's to map out our Universe. But even this picture fails to give our brains a proper grasp of the immensity of Everything. Fortunately, it is from atlasoftheuniverse.com where one can "zoom out" from 12.5 lys from the Sun all the way up to 14 Billion lys from the Sun, allowing one to adjust their sense of scale. Go ahead and click through. I'll wait.
Back? Good. Impressive isn't it. How the individual stars cluster and clump into groups, which then form galaxies, that then themselves become parts of clusters and super clusters. Still, if that didn't break your mind and make you feel utterly insignificant, yet vibrantly alive, then I have one more thing to show you.
This is the Millenium Run/Simulation, done by the Virgo Consortium. First run in 2005, it attempts to simulate the birth and growth of our Universe from the Big Bang to the Present Day. As you watch, keep in mind that the filaments and points of light are not mere stars and nebula, but strands and globular clusters of galaxies. Billions and billions of galaxies.
I can watch that video over and over and over again, and my sense of awe and wonder grow every time.
The last thing I want to add (and the thing that I mentioned back in the first paragraph) brings the scale back down to the merely Human. It is a gorgeous time-lapsed video of the Very Large Telescope in northern Chile.
I've asked it before, and I'll ask it again; what have we lost as a civilization that we can no longer see the starry sky? Where has our wonder gone?
I want you to look at this picture. Not just glance at it, admire it, and move on, but really study it. go ahead, I'll wait...
Done? Good. Did you notice that the astronauts are hanging 180 miles up in space? That they are free-floating around a section of the largest man-made object ever placed in orbit? That from there it would take them 243.5 seconds (or a little over nine hours) to free-fall to the ground after reaching a top speed of 1288.9 mph? Did you notice how bright it was because the sunlight is unfiltered by te Earth's protective atmosphere? Did the sense of unfettered freedom give you a sense of vertigo as your brain struggled to orient itself in an alien environment?
That, my friends, is how I feel when I dream. And it is ... AWESOME!
