Recently released is this view of “Unusual Spiral NGC 4921 in the Coma Galaxy Cluster,” taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. This view does not do it justice:
However, you can download far better resolution views here.
As with many Hubble deep views, just about everything you see in the image is millions to billions of light years away. With the exception of perhaps a dozen or so Milky Way Galaxy stars, it looks like NGC 4921 is the closest object… at a mere 320 million light years distance. Everything else is far beyond, including other spiral galaxies visible through NGC 4921. In essense, every little smudge here represents a galaxy with perhaps a hundred billion suns. Each sun perhaps has a planetary system, with perhaps an abode of life somewhere orbiting it. Magnify those suns and their life-bearing worlds by the sheer number of galaxies visible is just this one tiny, tiny little fragment of the sky. The full view covers about one and a half arc-minutes of sky… for comparison, the moon is 30 arc-minutes in apparent diameter.
The universe as revealed by science is more full of wonders than the most complex theology, more beautiful by far than the grandest cathedral.
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