(*Clicking on the above image will take you to a high resolution version. But beware, it's 18 MB so it will take time to load).
The above image is frequently referred to as the most important image ever taken by humanity. It is also a source of very personal and intense emotions to me. Whenever life starts getting cumbersome or I start feeling a tad bit too sad because things seem to be out of control, whenever I start taking myself and probably you too seriously, this is one image which almost shocks things into their proper perspectives. It's called the Hubble ultra deep field.
The hubble space telescope, on September 24 2003, focussed on a completely unramarkable portion of the night sky. It kept looking at the same spot for a bit more than 11 days and produced the image above. Our universe is almost unimaginably vast and the light coming from stars far far away is so dim that to take their image requires collecting light from them for a long time - a very long exposure shot. The portion of the sky that Hubble was looking at was only as big as a 1 mm square piece of paper held at a meter's distance from the eyes but even in this miniscule, unremarkable part of the cosmos, the telescope revealed the presence of stellar matter so brilliant and so numerous - it sends the brain whizzing. Every smudge, every spot, every set of non-black pixels that you see in the above image is a complete galaxy. Not just a star, a galaxy. To put things in perspective, our galaxy the milky way, which is rather a mediocre galaxy in terms of size, contains an estimated 200 billion stars and our Sun is merely an average star. The above photograph contains atleast 10000 galaxies - and all of it in just a faint cosmic whisper. The image is also a snapshot of our tumultous past. It takes 8 minutes for the light from the Sun to reach Earth. This means that every time we look directly at the Sun (if we can) we are not actually looking at how the Sun looks at the present moment but rather at how it looked 8 minutes ago. The farther an object is from us, the older in history its visual signature. The galaxies above have been calculated to be 13 billion light years away (13*1000000000*9,460,730,472,580.8 kms) which means this photograph actually shows how these galaxies looked 13 billion years ago. This is very close to the Big Bang. It is fascinating to realize that we are looking at something so ancient and so proximal to that primordial point of infinite density which by its own obliteration gave birth to a universe whose immense beauty we bask in.
I do not remember who but someone very eminent once said about the human race that we are what happens when Hydrogen is given 14 billion years - and how poetically beautiful, how exhilaratingly true! This image, on its own, makes me realize, enforces in me, a tremendous appreciation for the beautiful harmony of nature, its melodious evolution. It makes me wonder how pedestrian , in comparison, our own creation stories are, how utterly boring and uninspiring and local any other explanation of our presence. In the mysterious attractions of the black holes and the hellish symphony of the quasars our universe has given us wonders more surprising than any that humans have dreamed of. In its vast empty distances and hot swirling vortices, it has given us puzzles more intricate and beautiful than any other. In its utter and cruel inhospitablity to our life form, the universe has given us reasons to appreciate our balmy little blue planet - a whirlpool of human emotions and ambitions, the host to every conqueror who ever lived and every sinner who ever died, but ultimately a speck of nothingness drifting away silently, quietly, but more importantly, aimlessly into the inevitable arms of posterity.