The stars shine joyfully at their posts; when God calls them, they answer, 'Here we are!'; they shine to delight their Creator. (Baruch 3.34)

Welcome to some personal astronomy pages of mine.  They started out as explanatory pages to some users on astronomy forums and grew to contain personal log data I wanted to store in a central location.  Since then I've grown it to include some pages of fascinating interest to me as well as introductory pages on how amateur astronomy is done.

The Hubble Deep Field and Ultra Deep Field images have taken my astronomical imagination hostage.  Prior to these studies, it was thought the number of galaxies in the universe was in the billions, perhaps tens of billions.  The Hubble Deep Field uncovered about 3,000 galaxies.  The area of the sky it photographed is so small however, 27,000,000 such patches would be required to survey the entire sky.  This means the Hubble is capable of detecting 80 billion galaxies.  However, there must be many, many more than this, as the most common kind of galaxy are the faint dwarfs which are difficult to detect even when near us.

In the case of the Ultra Deep Field the exposure time was even longer (11 days instead of 10).  Imagine: a tiny core sample of the universe, in a remote part of the sky representing one of the blackest, smallest specks visible to the eye, yielding an image containing nearly 10,000 galaxies, each with 100 billion stars, on average.

The universe is so big that light from the other side hasn't even reached us yet.  And the number of stars visible to modern telescopes is approximately 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (70 sextillion).  The actual number is probably much larger, say astronomers "and may even be infinite," said Dr Simon Driver, the scientist who conducted this survey.