WOW!

That's all you can say when you take a look at this.

I'm not a religious person, was once before but it didn't stick.

Anyway, it is difficult for me to comprehend the concept of "Eternity". That's a long, long time. Aren't you going to run out of things to do? And the whole question of where god came from has always tripped me up.

I'm not an atheist, that requires even more faith than being a believer, and I respect religious (or for those so inclined, "spiritual") beliefs that aren't forced into law to hamper my rights to do all the things that believers believe will send me to hell. But I'm not a believer.

In University Astronomy 101, I had the same problem grasping the scientific explanation for the universe. The sheer vastness of space is simply beyond my ability to comprehend. Maybe it exposes my intellectual shortcomings but the more we learned in that fascinating class, the more difficult it was for me to grasp. Oh I got all the details and made decent grades but it hurt my head sometimes.

So when I see a picture of an object so vast that would take light 6 years to cross, I am astonished, amazed, dumbstruck, blah, blah,blah.

But here's something that I am curious about, maybe we learned this in that class but my head was in the more painful stages of exploding, we are told the Crab Nebula exploded around 1054 AD as stated hereor something like that and the Crab Nebula is 6,000 light years away. Is it a scientific standard to place an astronomical event at the moment it is observed instead of when it actually happened? For instance, by my math, it actually exploded around 5,000 bc.

Is this to keep all the Intelligent Designer's heads from exploding?