So leaving the protests of left vs. right in the streets of Paris, or the bottle throwing rockers in Berlin. I'm looking up.

It's good to look up regardless. Eva and I sometimes find ourselves looking up and seeing the tops of houses we have walked past hundreds of times in the last few months. Had we noticed the stained glass window? The arches over the doorway? The garden on their roof? The different colored bricks that form the windowsill? It isn't that we walk with our chin buried in our chests or our eyes on the spaces between the flagstones...we just don't raise our heads. Now it is a ritual. A smile and a head-tilt at least once on every street...just to make sure we don't miss out on anything.

Dubbed the "Tadpole," this spiral galaxy resides about 420 million light years away. Did you catch that? 420 million light years. Apparently the Hubble telescope has been hard at work. Visit their site and check out some of their pictures. Come on. Did you see how many galaxies there are in one photo? Unbelievable. You still think we're alone in this sealed jar on god's shelf? Or alone in the wading pool in creation's back yard? I think not.

Staring into the night sky has awed people from the beginning of time. It makes you feel so small. Infinately small. Humbling. It can lead you into thoughts of chaos or in the direction of divine architecture. Though my father shakes a bit (he always has) he grabs his binoculars on particularly dark nights and walks out the back door onto the deck and watches the night sky for satelites, planets, stars, and constelations. He says he dreams of a yard light he can turn off with a switch--but the blackest of nights swallows up the few yard lights in the country anyway.

On well-lit nights he sometimes turns off the headllights in the car for a bit just to see how bright the land has become...how much light the moon has. Can you read by it? Yes, on some occasions.

It's just unbelievable. Look at it. The pictures seem as fake as being transported by Scottie. We are in one of those swirling eddies. Dust with dust. Wow.

IN THE NEWS:
The Hubble Space Telescope outdid itself today with the release of the first pictures taken by a new camera mounted on the orbiting observatory in March. The images range from depicting sheer cosmic beauty, in classic Hubble style, to the surprise finding of thousands of distant and previously invisible galaxies.