… it was deliberately chosen because it’s a dull, uninteresting piece of sky

Professor Brian Cox
on the subject of the
Hubble Telescope’s
’Deep Field’ photograph

Dull and uninteresting, it was once thought. ‘A tiny patch of sky.’ Yet it turns out that this image has captured more than 10,000 ‘blobs’ of light which are actually galaxies, and each galaxy, Professor Cox tells us, ‘contains what? Around one hundred thousand million stars.’

Quite often, upon returning home from an evening out somewhere, I’ll make a hot drink and sit down to an hour or so’s quietness – a bit of time to reflect, a check on email, a bit of scrolling, and perhaps to learn a thing or two. And so, tonight, in the course of relaxed accident, I came across a couple of reflections on Hubble’s ‘Deep Field.’

It’s a bit late at night to even begin to process the space around 100,000 million stars. I doubt that morning freshness will help much with the revelation either. But, heading for my bed, past midnight, I’m struck by what a privilege it is to be alive at such a time of discovery and reach. Struck too, and inspired, by invitation from an ever-expanding universe, to try to maintain some sense of perspective and proportion about our human condition, here on our little planet, a mere 8000 miles in diameter, with its little walls and insistences about ‘sovereignties’ and ‘facts.’ Perspective and proportion that, in the course of time, and perhaps beyond time, may quieten grandiose, human notions about our ‘greatness’ (past, present or ‘again’) – in the known presence of proportions and reach vastly greater than our present ability fully to measure, or to comprehend.

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