The Milky Way

So when you look up at the night sky in a really dark place like in a desert the number of stars is simply overwhelming. Now with the aid of really good telescopes and digital technology, over 3,000 pictures of the entire night sky have been stitched together to display this incredible mosaic. Here* is a zoomable version that lets you see stars not visible to the human eye. Pick a dark spot and zoom in, for instance the lower right hand corner. Amazingly enough there are thousands of points of light, mostly red. Almost all of these are extremely distant Galaxies which are collections of billions of stars. Billions of stars in each galaxy. The bright band across the full picture is our view of the Milky Way from inside. Again, billions of stars.

So what kind of god makes a universe of this magnitude and age just to fuck with some humans and test their belief? A True Believer knows from the Bible that the earth is flat and the sun revolves around the earth. They are not allowed to question.

via
*This site is slow to load but worth the wait.

Another Hubble Picture to Impress How Minute We Are

I think I count 8 items in this photograph that are not galaxies. This picture is of a chunk of sky about the same size as a star.

To Infinity and Beyond!

My uncle died last year and his funeral service was held in a Baptist church. The preacher went on for a miserable hour and a half about how good people like him would be raptured to heaven and how bad people like me were going to burn in a lake of fire. At one point he said that atheists look up at the night sky and see "thousands" of stars. I think that sums up how small and pitiful his view of the universe is. I would imagine in his tiny, cult saturated mind the universe rotates around the earth and the earth is flat (because the Bible says it is). When he said "thousands" as if he had some kind of insight into the thinking of a non-believer (with a bit of a smirk on his face) I could only think of photographs like this one which spans an area of the night sky that could be covered by the tip of a pencil held out at arm's length. For him there's some kind of cloudy place with angels and people playing harps behind that pencil lead, for me there is something as close to infinity as our universe can give us. I would feel sorry for him if he wasn't a little nazi closeted fag piece of shit.


click on picture to be overwhelmed

from APOD