It’s amazing how much time I have spent just staring at the 36″x36″ poster of this image on the wall in my room.

The craziest thing happened today when I entered the Computer Science Lab as the Lab Assistant. I saw ‘the’ image on someone’s screen. Whoa, what is that person doing looking at ‘the’ picture? Are they as humbled and intrigued as I am by this image? Do they want to discuss it with me? Come to find out, today’s lab dealt with Photoshop and the students were to estimate the number of galaxies in the image based on a grid. Answers ranged from 3,000 to 1,000,000 but most of them were around 10,000 which seems to be about right.

The thing is, if you think about it - we’re looking at a picture of the sky with 10,000 galaxies in it. Ok, so what - there are 10,000 other galaxies in the Universe, I don’t feel that small. Wrong. The image is the equivalent to holding a grain of wheat up in the air at arm’s length in the sky. So we must extrapolate this 10,000 stars/wheat grain across the entire sky to estimate the total number of galaxies in the Universe. Whoo, what a task that is.

Regardless of your astronomical understanding of black holes, dark matter, or dark energy; if you’d like to humble yourself, blow your mind, or you’re just curious, head on over to this site and check out the zoomable picture of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field You won’t regret it.

I’m certain there are other life forms in the Universe. We may never contact them and they may never contact us, but the odds are simply astounding.

This image single handedly made me add Physics as a major, with the intent to study Astrophysics with Computer Science in Graduate School.