Vision

By Anonymous -
​It is nighttime on the planet Earth.  But that is only a whim of nature, a result of our planet rolling in space at 1,000 miles per minute.  What we call night is the time we spend facing the secret reaches of space, where other solar systems and, perhaps, other planetarians dwell.  Don’t think of the night as the absence of day; think of it as a kind of freedom.  Turned away from our sun, we see the dawning of far-flung galaxies.
​As you can imagine, this quote in the chapter on vision caught my attention because it gives you a cool, different perspective on night and day that I personally have never thought about.  Also, it paints a picture in my head about how vast the universe really is.  As we spend our daily lives we focus our attention on objects that are very close in distance.  For example, we normally look at our laptops, cell phone, friends, the car in front of us, etc.  Rarely do we look at the night sky and get a good glimpse of what else is out there.  Besides, to us all of the stars look the same distance away from us when in reality some are light years away while others are billions and billions.  This semester I took astronomy and many times we viewed planets like Jupiter from expensive high-powered telescopes in the observatory.  It was so interesting to see the universe from this perspective because it proved to me once more how large outer space really is.  Until recently, humans never really had an accurate perception of how big the universe was.  In the past few decades or so, astronomers and scientists have captured images of light billions of light years away.  Comparing distances like these to the distances of objects we view everyday really puts the size of our universe in perspective.  Attached is an article describing light discovered that is 30 billion light years away.



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