NASA confirms Dome w/ images

A composite image of the sky visible over Hawaii made over four years from a half-million exposures by the Pan-Starrs1 Observatory. If printed at full resolution, the researchers say, this photograph would be one and a half miles long. Credit Danny Farrow, Pan-Starrs1 Science Consortium and Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics

The Biggest Digital Map of the Cosmos Ever Made

Don’t Let Them Tell You You’re Not at the Center of the Universe

As T.S. Eliot put it:

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

And so Einstein’s relativity teaches us that the center of the universe is everywhere and nowhere. It is the present, surrounded by concentric shells of the past. History racing at you at 186,282 miles per second, the speed of light, the speed of all information. Your eyes are the cockpit of a time machine, filmy wet orbs looking in the only direction any of us can ever look: backward. Everything we see or feel or hear — now that gravitational waves have been discovered — took some time to get here, and so comes to our senses from the past. The moon, hovering over the horizon, is an image of light that left its cratered surface traveling at the speed of light a second and a half ago. The sun that burns your skin is eight minutes and nineteen seconds in the past.