feeling miniscule

I was doing a little Google-ing earlier and found...this:

"But what IS it?" you ask. [Besides fascinating] It's called a "horsehead nebula". Here's what the source had to say about it:

Horsehead Nebula. This photo was taken on the morning of October 5, 2000, at Kitt Peak Observatory as part of the Advanced Observing Program. The telescope was a Meade 16 inch LX200 (f/6.3) with an SBIG ST-8E CCD camera. Adam Block, lead observer, Betty Peterson and Mel Peterson were the photographers. This picture was processed using LRGB color production with exposures of 48 minutes for the luminance (greyscale), 10 minutes for the red component, 10 minutes for the green component, and 20 minutes for the blue component. The full size image is 1522 x 1006 pixels. Kitt Peak is the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) and is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc. See Astronomy, October, 2000, page 80, for an article on this program by Adam Block.

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I got this from a really neat site about the astronomy program at Augustana College, in Illinois. There were lots of other really cool pictures besides this one. [Click above where the word 'source' is highlighted for the whole page.]

I like to look at big pictures of the universe - it makes you realize that our day-to-day trifles are miniscule in the grand scheme of things...hmmm...now that I've gotten all philosophical, I beleive it's time to go off and watch the Twilight Zone before Sarah demands her DVD returned.

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After delving a little further into the site, I found out they have an astronomy picture of the day. Here's a link: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html