ten days of perfect tunes, the colors red and blue

This weekend I went to the planetarium in Salt Lake. I learned some pretty cool things--like, did you know that Mars is less dense than water? Or maybe that was Saturn. Well, who cares. Anyway, I saw the "Night Vision" show, and I liked it. The guy pointed out a bunch of constellations which I have no hope of finding again, so let's hope that I'm never lost in the forest and need to figure out which one is Polaris.Yeah, I KNOW it's the bright one directly north, but if I knew where north was I WOULDN'T BE LOOKING FOR IT.

The coolest part of the show was the very end. I was skeptical when the guy said he was going to blow my mind, but he did! He pulled up this picture and it hung above us on the dome like this giant night sky.

This is an image from the Hubble telescope. They pointed the telescope at a tiny little pinprick in the night sky. There was nothing visible where they pointed it, just empty blackness. They wanted to see if it could maybe capture a couple of stars that weren't visible to the human eye. This picture came back, and it looks like a regular old starry sky, which is still cool considering that we can't see this from Earth. But the thing is, it's not a starry sky. I've circled for your convenience the only stars in the picture. Everything else in the picture is galaxies. Can you believe that? Galaxies! Not only did I feel tiny, I felt like the whole human race is so tiny. And now I know there are aliens out there and I'm not crazy for watching History channel specials on UFOs.