Sitting meditation resources:
- Meditation Handbook approaches (and a lot of other stuff)
- Shinay Tibetan practice
- C’han sitting practice
- Jack Kornfeld sitting meditation
- Won Buddhism sitting practice
- Zazen practice
- Thich Nhat Hanh sitting meditation
- Comparison of Christian and Zen sitting practice
- Four sitting practices
- Tonglen practice while sitting
The other day I blogged that the Hubble photo was a glimpse into the suburbs of the universe. Of course this isn’t true at all. In fact we live on the edge of the universe. Every moment, as the universe keeps expanding, we get further and futher away from the Big Bang. So any photograph that sees 12 billion years into the past is actually looking towards the centre of the universe, or downtown.
In 1964, the echoes of the bigbang were discovered. The entire universe is bathed in cosmic background radiation which is essentially the sound of the Big Bang cooking everything up. If we look far enough back we see nothing but smooth energy. The above photo is a representation of this, except that it gives the impression that the cosmic background radiation is OUTSIDE of us, as if we live in a fishbowl universe, floating around. In reality our universe is more like a balloon, being inflated. We are on the outside of the balloon getting further and further away from everything. So the background radiation is in our past, in the direction from which we have come.
In other words, welcome to the suburbs folks.
More from the deep dark suburbs of the universe…
A massive cluster of yellowish galaxies, seemingly caught in a red and blue spider web of eerily distorted background galaxies, makes for a spellbinding picture from the new Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. To make this unprecedented image of the cosmos, Hubble peered straight through the center of one of the most massive galaxy clusters known, called Abell 1689. The gravity of the cluster’s trillion stars � plus dark matter � acts as a 2-million-light-year-wide “lens” in space. This “gravitational lens” bends and magnifies the light of the galaxies located far behind it. Some of the faintest objects in the picture are probably over 13 billion light-years away (redshift value 6).
Though gravitational lensing has been studied previously by Hubble and ground-based telescopes, this phenomenon has never been seen before in such detail. The ACS picture reveals 10 times more arcs than would be seen by a ground-based telescope. The ACS is 5 times more sensitive and provides pictures that are twice as sharp as the previous work-horse Hubble cameras. So it can see the very faintest arcs with greater clarity. The picture presents an immense jigsaw puzzle for Hubble astronomers to spend months untangling. Interspersed with the foreground cluster are thousands of galaxies, which are lensed images of the galaxies in the background universe. Detailed analysis of the images promises to shed light on galaxy evolution, the curvature of space, and the mystery of dark matter. The picture is an exquisite demonstration of Albert Einstein’s prediction that gravity warps space and distorts beams of light.
From hubblesite.org
A new image from the Hubble Space Telescope is an example of ‘painting with light’. Astronomers use the separated colours produced by oxygen and hydrogen to investigate star-forming processes in the nebula NGC 2080. The colours explain much about the nature of such nebulae.
–from the European Space Agency