Whenever you start to feel like the centre of the universe...

...stop and take a look at these.

They're the newest photos from the Hubble Space Telescope, and they're spectacular.

Makes you reconsider your significance as a teeny speck, now doesn't it? I also found an interesting explanation for how they get those photos to look so beautiful. Yep. Lots of Photoshop and a little bit of science, too.

This one's my personal favourite:


Amazing to see the way light is manipulated, when so much that we manipulate is with our hands (the word comes from latin for "hand", so yeah, I guess that might have a little something to do with it). Making the intangible tangible. It gives me the tinglies. And no, it doesn't make me feel closer to God. In fact, it doesn't give me a hankering for god(s) in the slightest. The reality of the universe is so stunning and incapacitatingly god-like on its own, there's no need for something beyond it. To me, that is "god": the weightless, seemingly purposeless yet wholly purposeful expanse of...existence. Wow.