The Universe Beads are an extreme distillation of knowledge. This one sacred object is the result of the life’s work of thousands of curious minds applying their human ingenuity over the course of thousands of years to decipher the subtle secrets the Universe that has been whispering to us all along. Out of this careful listening is emerging a single story too large for one human mind to totally comprehend. It is a story for all beings. Using pieces of glass, plastic, and stone as symbols, the Universe Beads lay this story before you.
A Universe in One’s Pocket
To celebrate its 28th anniversary in space the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope took this amazing and colourful image of the Lagoon Nebula. The whole nebula, about 4000 light-years away, is an incredible 55 light-years wide and 20 light-years tall. This image shows only a small part of this turbulent star-formation region, about four light-years across. This stunning nebula was first catalogued in 1654 by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Hodierna, who sought to record nebulous objects in the night sky so they would not be mistaken for comets. Since Hodierna’s observations, the Lagoon Nebula has been photographed and analysed by many telescopes and astronomers all over the world. The observations were taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 between 12 February and 18 February 2018.