how cool is the universe

Here's something that I think is awesome:

Space.

Space is amazing. It's one of those things on which I can spend hours trawling through Wikipedia pages, or hours flicking through Astronomy Picture of the Day pictures, or other such things. It just fascinates me no end. At the time of writing, APOD has a picture of the sky over the sea near Buenos Aires which shows Venus, Jupiter, the Pleiades, Aldebaran, an asteroid named Vesta and a dwarf planet named Ceres. I read, through clicking through to another page, that Ceres was the first object found in the asteroid belt when they were looking for a planet between Mars and Jupiter. See, I never knew that but it's fascinating. A bit more distracted reading and I find this diagram of trans-Neptunian objects and their orbital inclinations, which also shows a whole lot of other tiny objects floating around the outer solar system. This stuff is nuts. Also, it reminds me of the existence of an asteroid known as 87 Sylvia ('sif that's not named after someone I love dearly) which was the first asteroid known to have two moons. It's a freaking asteroid with a diameter smaller than Tasmania and it has moons!

At this point I could talk about the tweet I saw this week from some bloke, retweeted by a more famous bloke, which said words to the effect that the religious person's admiration of the universe is limited by the notion of God, but that the atheist person's admiration of the universe is infinite... I could talk about that, but I'd prefer to spend my time being amazed by Orion all over again.