Ultra Deep

The September-October 2007 issue of Utne includes an article that originally appeared in the July/August 2007 issue of Orion. In it, Anthony Doerr writes about the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image, which he calls "the most incredible photograph ever taken." Taken over several months in 2003 and 2004, the image is an incredibly "deep" high-resolution look at a tiny, tiny section of space. Doerr describes it as "like peering through an 8-foot soda straw."

Doerr says that the photograph "should be in every classroom in the world. It should be on the president's desk. It should probably be in every church, too."

He quotes Einstein:

To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection . . . . this is religiousness.

Doerr concludes

Whatever we believe in--God, children, nationhood--nothing can be more important than to take a moment every now and then and accept the invitation of the sky: to leave the confines of ourselves and fly off into the hugeness of the universe, to disappear into the inexplicable, the implacable, the reflection of that something our minds cannot grasp (92).

(I just noticed that last year I posted a quote from Chet Raymo about the same image.)