It's in the Stars, Obviously

This week, I was watching the news and saw some amazing new pictures which had been sent back from the Hubble telescope. I think it was the same night that Christopher was cooking, because I remember calling him in from the kitchen to see the photos on TV.

The following day, while I was at work, I had a few moments and decided that I wanted to change my screen image to one of those starry shots. I searched through them and read all of the descriptions, and finally came across one that spoke to me both visually and descriptively.

Here is the beginning of what the caption on the website says:

This celestial object looks like a delicate butterfly. But it is far from serene.

What resemble dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour—fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 24 minutes!

A dying star that was once about five times the mass of the Sun is at the center of this fury. It has ejected its envelope of gases and is now unleashing a stream of ultraviolet radiation that is making the cast-off material glow. This object is an example of a planetary nebula, so-named because many of them have a round appearance resembling that of a planet when viewed through a small telescope.

I'm not sure what it says about me -- or about my mental state at work -- but I find the image to be more beautiful because that delicate look was caused by something so overwhelmingly cataclysmic.

So, with no explanation attached, I posted the picture on my computer at work and didn't think much else about it -- at least until I came home that night.

I was puttering around the house, and wandered into the office where Christopher was working on his computer. It took me a moment to notice that he had changed his screen "wallpaper," and another second to realize that he had also chosen an image from the Hubble photographs.

In fact, although we never discussed it, he had chosen the exact same one.

How cool is that?

**For the full scrapbook of new Hubble photos, check out their website, here.