“If we could speed up our sense of time

until thousands of years were speeding by in the wink of an eye,

we would see bright nebulae burst into light,

deliver themselves of a shower of stars, then fade back into darkness.”

Timothy Ferris

The Eye of God is Watching Us

It must see everything we do

Perhaps before we act rashly or in hatred

We should begin to think things through

This is a composite photo taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona in 2003.   It is popularly referred to as ‘The Eye of God.’

This amazing photo image depicts the so-called Helix Nebula and offers a dizzying look down what is actually a trillion-mile-long tunnel of glowing gases.

The fluorescing tube is pointed almost directly at Earth and at its center is a dying Sun-like star which has ejected masses of dust and gas to form tentacle-like filaments stretching toward an outer rim composed of the same material.   It is one of the nearest planetary nebulae to us.

To capture this sprawling nebula image, Hubble had to take nine separate snapshots, and astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute assembled these nine images into a wondrous mosaic. The mosaic was then blended with a wider photograph taken by the Mosaic Camera on the National Science Foundation’s telescope at Kitt Peak National Optical Astronomy Observatory. The radiant tie-die colors correspond to glowing hydrogen and nitrogen (red) and oxygen (blue).

Planetary nebulae like the Helix are believed to be sculpted late in a Sun-like star’s life by a torrential gush of gases escaping from a dying star.

Our own Sun may look like this ‘Eye of God’ one day, when it also begins to perish.

And this galactic image always makes me truly ponder many things.