click pic to source
and the bad astronomer gets poetic:
'the light had been traveling a long time, oh, such a long time. it had passed gas clouds, tenuous patches of dust, interstellar and then even intergalactic space. it had blasted through countless atoms and unimaginable stretches of space and time, and now the light had been reduced to a mere echo of its once epic luminosity. but it was enough… after spending the age of the universe careening through it, those few remaining photons finally saw something blocking their path that they couldn’t barrel their way through.
NASA’s swift satellite.'
read more of phil plait's post here.
