Every time we go to a new place, or when we first see strange lands, unexpected things are seen. Sometimes blurred and faint due to distance, not clear, hazy and indistinct, but sometimes our first sighting of whole new unexpected universes.

There’s no telling what this is, but it is intriguing. Maybe not ‘cosmic strings’, but something quite ordinary. Then again, maybe something truly rich and strange.

“We are, by definition, at the very center of the observable region.

With increasing distance, our knowledge fades, and fades rapidly. Eventually, we reach the dim boundary—the utmost limits of our telescopes. There, we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. Not until the empirical resources are exhausted, need we pass on to the dreamy realms of speculation.”

― Edwin Powell Hubble, The Realm of the Nebulae

…
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

–John Keats
“On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer”