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I recently discovered the above video, a tour of the known universe by the American Museum of Natural History, and was reminded that 2009 has been the International Year of Astronomy.  It has been exactly 400 years since Galileo Galilei first gazed through a telescope at the planets and stars in the sky. And while there is still much we have yet to understand about our universe, I think we can all appreciate the sheer beauty that is visible through our modern telescopes. We can now see things Galileo could never have dreamed of.

In 2014 NASA will launch the James Webb Space Telescope, which will be placed beyond the orbit of the Moon. Until then though, the Hubble will remain one of our best sources of images. The Hubble galleries are free online here and are well worth looking through. (My personal favorite is the image of the Pillars of Creation, star forming regions of gas in the Eagle Nebula. The column on the left is over 4 light years long, or 23,516,000,000,000 miles.)

Microsoft has developed a software that allows you to see many of the images taken by the telescopes we have had in operation over the past few decades. This software is called Worldwide Telescope and is available for free here. The program also includes guided tours created by both astronomers and users.

It is worth remembering that to look into a telescope is to look into the past; light travels at a finite speed, so the image you are seeing is as old as the number of light years away the object is. What I find most awe inspiring about this is that, when we look far enough, we can see almost to the beginning of the universe. The cosmic microwave background radiation was discovered in 1964 by two Americans. It is the remnants of an early stage in the life of the universe, when all of space (which was relatively small at this point) was filled with plasma. Because of this, we will never be able to see beyond the CMB. However, we have been able to use the distribution of the CMB to date the universe to 13.77 billion years old; I’ve heard it said by a physicist that we have the number to an accuracy of four decimal places, or within an hour.

I study biology, but I love astronomy because it always forces you to put things in perspective. It is hard to look at Earthrise or the Pale Blue Dot photo taken by Voyager 1 and not be reminded of how small and fragile our world is. As and Carl Sagan noted, it is hard to look at the images of our universe and not realize both how misplaced our arrogance and hubris are and how important our treatment of each other is. (I quoted him at length in this post.) While there is almost certainly more life out there, for now our planet harbors the only life we can be sure exists. I have heard it said that we are the universe’s conscience; we can observe it in all of its majesty. But we also have the capacity to destroy that conscience. One can only hope that the reminders produced by our telescopes can save us from that fate.