im mostly talking about all the antivax and skeptic articles.

In the end, I take it as a matter of faith. As must you for your view. I cannot provide “concrete irrefutable proof” that God is the creator and architect. But neither can you prove that an infinite being did not create and direct the universe.
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I cannot prove a negative, no. You are right. But if there is a creator and architect to the universe, what did he/she create, exactly? How is he/she directing it, exactly?

He/she didn’t create stars and planets. We can see them forming in nebulas in our own galaxy by natural forces, so we can conclude that there is no outside force that forms stars and planets. He/she didn’t create galaxies, because we can see them in the deep field Hubble images and see them forming naturally due to gravitational and electromagnetic forces. We can even see the background radiation from before the energy of the universe had settled down into matter, and there are no patterns that indicate the hand of a designer.

And it becomes even fuzzier if we start thinking about God the director. The events that happen in the universe around us all seem to happen as predicted due to the forces we can measure. When stars run out of fuel, they collapse or go nova, depending on their size and composition. Expansion pulls galaxies away from each other, unless they’re close enough and gravity pulls them toward each other. On the whole, stuff out there behaves the way it should. God is either an extremely neurotic micromanager or a very hands-off director. Sure, there are still plenty of mysteries, but do you really want to plug God into those gaps as a holy placeholder?

All that’s really left is the constants. You can believe that God said “Let There Be Light, and Let Its Velocity Be 299,792,458 Meters Per Second In A Vacuum.” But why? Is that the optimal speed for light to travel? Is it the most likely to produce life? Is it just random, or chosen on a whim? Is it an experiment – will the next universe have a speed of light of 299,792,459 m/s, and so on?

Ultimately, it’s a philosophical question, and the answer depends on what you want your God to be. You’re welcome to see him/her as you please. Personally, I don’t want my God to be a neurotic director or an experimenting cosmologician or that vindictive jerk from the Old Testament.

I do see each discovery, each new thing Humanity learns as expanding our knowledge and Understanding of this wonderous creation.

But don’t let it fool you into thinking it’s all rainbows and unicorns, because the universe is also a very deadly place also.

Pfff don’t even get me started on unicorns. Vicious little buggers, they are…

I’d add that, in much the same way that a gambler might “forget” his fifty losing hands, look at his ten winning hands, and conclude that the night went very well, we “forget” about all the deadly/dangerous aspects of the universe and focus on the “pretty” aspects of it. So, yes, the universe is a very beautiful place. But don’t let it fool you into thinking it’s all rainbows and unicorns, because the universe is also a very deadly place also.

You look at the universe and say, Wow look how beautiful and awesome everything turned out.
Yet I look at the universe and think, “How can you see such an incredibly complex, (and moreso the more we learn) Universe and not see that it was supremely designed?
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Simple. Because there is no evidence that it was supremely designed. In fact, there’s no evidence of design, period.

These things like stars and galaxies and nebulae are not inherently beautiful. In fact, they’re quite ugly and frightening up close.

Stars are giant balls of plasma that put out all sorts of harmful and deadly radiation. Galaxies are collections of stars orbiting supermassive blackholes that could, according to the Drake equation, be massacring thousands if not millions of civilizations as they suck the life out of stars near the hub. Nebulae are huge inhospitable clouds of poisonous gases and dust left over from the violent and cataclysmic death of a star.

They’re only beautiful because our human eyes like colors, and because our human brains like patterns and order and recognizable shapes. That’s not evidence of design, that’s evidence of interpretation.

Quite simply, there is no evidence that the universe or our solar system or life on Earth was designed in any way. There’s plenty of evidence that these things arrived at their present state due to natural forces, but no evidence of design. In fact, there’s no evidence that it was created.

Two words: Creation myth.

Hint: Click the link and scroll down — it’s a bloody long list!

Thinking about NGC 4945…

If I start with knowing how big it must be, then I am amazed how far it must be from us.

If I start with knowing how far away it is, I am amazed how big it must be.

I also find it interesting that even if we could get closer, it would still not look the way it does in images. Think about the Milky Way. That’s what galaxies look like up close.

Mind you don’t fall off the planet while you’re messing around down there.

Seriously, tho. Way jealous at being able to see the Magellanic Clouds. Omega Centauri, I should think, would also be a good target for that Galileoscope.

The other reason they use filters is that the vast majority of “ordinary” digital cameras use colored filters (red, green, blue) alternating over the pixels – the “picture elements” themselves are actually monochromatic – the camera’s software then blends it all together for the final image that you see. But this sacrifices some image detail since you are only using 1/3 of the available pixels in the sensor for each color, then the camera averages it all together. That’s the main reason why more megapixels is better.

By imaging astronomical objects using separate filters placed over a monochromatic imaging sensor, astronomers get more detail in the images since ALL the pixels in the sensor are available for each wavelength. Obviously it takes longer to expose since it has to be done for each filter, instead of all at once, then an imaging specialist will blend it all together in software back at the computer lab to create the final amazing image BA shares with us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm3Sj8qAaWg&feature=channel

The Angular Diameter of the Moon* is 29.3 to 34.1 arcminutes; the Major Diameter of NGC 4945 is 20.0 arcminutes and the Minor Diameter is 3.8 arcminutes.

So, if NGC 4945 was bright enough to see with the naked eye, it would appear about 2/3 the diameter of the Full Moon.

*Source: Wikipedia — Moon.

I’m a little confused too. Does this mean that if it was bright enough to see with the naked eye it would cover as much sky as the full moon? If so, holy smoke.