Sunday, March 06, 2005  A peephole to the gods?  Under truly
dark skies our ancestors saw the middle "star" of Orion's sword
as a tiny smudge of light. The Englishman William Derham, who
wrote on cosmology in the early 18th century, believed the glow
in Orion was a opening in the celestial sphere through which we
observe the radiance of God.  We now know that there is no such
thing as a starry sphere enclosing Earth like an eggshell, nor
an Empyrean beyond where reside God and the souls of the saintly
departed. We live instead in a universe of possibly endless
dimension, filled everywhere with stars, nebulae, and galaxies.
The smudge of light we see in Orion's sword is revealed by
modern astrophotography to be a vast region of glowing dust and
gas -- a nursery of stars -- not a peephole through which we
glimpse the divinity.  Or isn't it?  I defy anyone to look at
the Hubble Space Telescope's image of the Orion nebula or
astrophotographer David Malin's view of the same object and not
be awed.  The nebula is