Cosmic Porn

Sometimes I try to imagine worlds worse than this one. Now that came out terribly pessimistic but that isn't how I intended it. What I mean is I try to imagine awfully shitty scenarios. Yes, I'm a barrel of fun. I try to conjure up worlds in which I don't think I could bear to live in. Of them all, one of the worst would be a world without a night sky. Nothing. Nothing at all. Maybe clouds. Maybe a solid color, one for day and one for night, both octaves of unimpressive blue. But other than that, imagine a sky made up of nothing remarkable. Imagine a drab and hollow sky that droops down sullenly on us rather than dives deeper into itself, plunging away into a world and a scope of time we can barely comprehend.

I couldn't bear that. I need a moon to stare at, planets to emerge to the naked eye at various points through the year. I need stars to crackle like tiny little bonfires roaring silently. I need burnishing strings upon strings of constellations, most of whose names escape me. I need deep, pulverizing cosmic abyss. What gives me such profound amazement is to simply contemplate how old everything is and our relation to that. How some of those stars are in fact dead and gone, but here where we are they appear vibrant and effulgent. How when I peer towards the sky it's as if I'm looking down a massive telescopic widescreen lens through eons and eons of time. All this gives me a dual sense of microscopic unimportance and a small but no less vital role in something monstrous. The sky is a mostly illegible cosmic timetable that tells the longest story in the world, one that involves us. And the story keeps getting older, keeps getting deeper, keeps getting interesting. For small creatures such as we, Sagan once said, the vastness is bearable only through love. 

With that in mind, I'm obviously ecstatic when there's new astrological photography released, especially NewScientist's Award Winning Series', which are time and time again breathtaking. The photo near the top of this post is my favorite. Below is a close second, Mars shining in the top left-hand corner.