the space between the stars

In your skin, my dear There are planets. Can you see them?  

“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is “mere.” I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part - perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined!”

NGC 4725, one-armed spiral galaxy The larger galaxy here, NGC 4725, is an asymmetric, “one-armed” spiral galaxy in Coma Berenices. The smaller galaxy is NGC 4712.

Partial context mosaic of the Earth and Saturn taken by NASA’s Cassini orbiter on July 19, 2013. This mosaic was assembled from five wide angle camera raw images.