A correction from an astronomy geek (past president of the Louisville Astronomical Society) –

The image is the furthest and deepest ever taken in visible-light (as opposed to say infra-red or ultra-violet) not the naked eye. The term "naked-eye" is usually meant as, "without the aid of a telescope or camera"

The image was intentionally taken to capture items that are actually quite near to us (by astronomical standards), not the very deep space stuff like that of the famous Hubble Deep Field photo. We think we know quite a bit about the stars in the Andromeda Galaxy – this photo is an attempt to verify it. It will help to determine if current theories are accurate or need work.

Dean, I am intrigued by the love/hate fascination you seem to have with science. When Galileo pointed his crude telescope at Jupiter and Saturn he discovered that one had rings and the other had at least four moons. I am curious. Do you think that was useful information?

Love/hate? What ever gave you the impression that I have anything but a love/love view of science? I practically worship at the altar of the scientific method.

I share the view of a lot of working professional scientists (including at least one Nobel laureat) that study of the very very large and the very very small (i.e. astronomy and physics) long ago reached a cost/benefit ratio that's ridiculous.

We spend millions or billions attempting to study things like subatomic particles or objects millions of light-years away, because these subjects are sexy. Yet there are countless areas of potentially useful research that receive no funding at all. Or for which working researchers often spend years of work just to eke out a few tens of thousands of dollars in grants.

Can you be more specific about the research topics you see as potentially useful but unfunded?

Priorities are important when money is finite. But our ability to know what's going to pay off is finite, too.

The discovery of Jupiter's moons by Galileo led to Ole Roemer's first correct ballpark measurement of the speed of light. The knowledge of the speed of light in turn led to James Clerk Maxwell's great Eureka moment, when he discovered that it was exactly the same as the speed of the mysterious waves that appeared in his unified theory of electromagnetism. (By that time the speed of light had also been measured in the laboratory, but that was only a few years earlier-- for hundreds of years it was best known through astronomical methods, most accurately from the aberration of starlight, I believe.) And much of the modern technological world emerged from applications of Maxwell's theory.

I don't say that none of it would have happened if Galileo hadn't seen the moons of Jupiter when he did... and the payoff took centuries... but everything is connected. And studying things far away can tell us about physical phenomena that happen here. Observational cosmology, for instance, is a steal compared to the money required to replicate Big Bang-like conditions in the lab. We don't know what the applications of that might be, if any, but there could be some centuries down the road, and the long view is actually important.

Dean,

I agree with Mike, Fred and Matt on this one. The human destiny -- a long time away but none the leas certain -- is that we must learn how to get off this planet, out of this solar system and find some other planet whose star is not relatively soon scheduled to burn up its hydrogen, expand, boil away our water supply, and burn our world to a cinder.

Or perhaps in some future long distant era, we can find some way to engineer the movement of large interstellar hydrogen clouds and feed them into our star so that it can give us regularized light and warmth. Perhaps indefinitely. Is this goal not worth whatever research budget may be assigned?

On the microscopic level, the more developed and crowded this planet becomes, the more we may become victims to overnight plaques unimaginably more virulent than those known to us today. Is the intensive and expanded study of all facets of microbiology not worth more to all of us than the sum of the world's cosmetics and spectator sports?

Scientific research is the side of the bread that your future is buttered on. You would be well-advised not to give any aspect of it short shrift.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

What I find odd about this discussion is that we're subtly altering "research in astronomy gets more funding and attention than more valuable research" to "research is worthless."

Pictures that can allow us to see, without special assistance to the human eye, items that are many millions of light years away, are beautiful and awe-inspiring. They may even eventually yield some useful data.

Astronomy and physics are sexy. Research on things like the full understanding of human diet, longevity, sociology, paleontology, anthropology, and others are less sexy but no less valuable.

Nobel prize-winning biochemist Kary Mullis has said much the same thing.

All research is valuable. If it's unpolluted by politics, anyway.

Lest we forget; awe is useful.

Actually, it is vital.

Love the Hubble! I think it has shown us the location of where we should send all telemarketing supervisors and internet spam. If you look real close, you can see a Papa John's franchise about to have its grand opening.

Tim