On November 1st 2006, I wrote on another website:
Re: The Amazing Hubble Telescope
The decision to repair and give a new lease of life to the Hubble Space telescope is good news indeed for astronomophiles(like myself) everywhere. From today's Globe and Mail:
"Among its many scientific accomplishments, the Hubble enabled direct observation of the universe as it was 12 billion years ago, discovered black holes at the centre of many galaxies, provided measurements that helped establish the size and age of the universe and offered evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
It also popularized astronomy with its countless images."
The most amazing and meaningful picture ever taken in astronomy, IMHO, was taken by this space telescope and is called the Hubble Deep Field. I blogged about this in April 2006 on the FIELD Heritage site:
"The Hubble Deep Field was a photograph taken by the Hubble telescope in 1995 and showed how an unremarkable part of the sky in both the northern and southern hemisphere has tens of millions of galaxies, each with billions to a trillion stars like our own sun:
Hubble Deep space multimedia link ------>> http://hubblesite.org/discoveries/hubble_deep_field/
For me the Deep Field composite picture is,so far, the most amazing picture in Astronomy because the telescope focussed on a supposedly boring part of the sky for 10 straight days and this picture turned up. And this was one picture in the northern hemisphere only. A similar picture was seen in the southern hemisphere. It was on the basis of this picture that scientists have estimated that, roughly, there are 100 billion galaxies in the universe, each with plus or minus 100 billion to a trillion stars.
If the visible universe is only 5% of the entire universe and reveals the above picture, if you count the 25% of the universe that is made up of invisible dark matter and 70% made up of invisible dark energy, this all makes for a gargantuan universe, impossible to imagine or quantify with the feeble instrument of rational human intellect, the mind. 100 billion multiplied by a trillion equals a number no mind can imagine or wrap itself around.
If you are a theist this has implications, one of which is that it shows how feeble the human mind really is, that the human mind cannot imagine its maker or reach it with even the ultimate in rational knowledge and that one needs to use other means to know and understand one's maker. This, then, takes us into the realms of mysticism and the timeless, instantaneous intellect and knowledge revealed to prophets and other inspired human beings."
The Hubble telescope has taken many 'deep field' type pictures and these may be viewed here:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/apod/apod_search?Hubble+Deep+Field
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4.
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3
