May Day!

Happy May Day!  The calendar I chose for 2008 is called "Space Views from the Hubble Space Telescope" and I flipped to a new month this morning and there is the coolest new image for May, the Cat's Eye Nebula.

Is that not the coolest looking thing? It is approximately 3,300 light years away from Earth. A light year is a measure of length, not time, and is the distance light waves can travel in a vacuum in a year or approximately 5,878,625,373,183.61 miles.  One of the things I find the most fascinating about viewing things in space is that the light waves that hit our eyes and allow us to "see" stars/nebulas/galaxies etc at a precise moment, actually left or departed the star/nebula/galaxy hundreds or thousands of years ago.  In the case of the Cat's Eye Nebula, the light waves that are producing the image in our minds left it 3,300 years ago. Therefore, it very well could be (and perhaps is) long gone in "real time", like at this very moment even though we are looking right at it! Crazy.  Time is relative when you're talking about space anyway. I have done some very lightweight reading on quantum physics and it is fascinating stuff if you can wrap your mind around it. I found a quote (how fitting!) that sums it all up nicely: "Quantum Physics: The dreams stuff is made of." Indeed.