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The monster from the Tarantula nebula:

Japanese Space Probe Wrap

The Hayabusa space probe, which took off from Kagoshima in 2003 and parachuted into the Australian outback on June 13 this year, may be carrying asteroid dust. If so, the dust came from an asteroid that is a lazy 300,000,000 kilometres from Earth, and it could provide clues about the origins of our solar system.

Another probe, Kaguya, is giving us clues about the origins of our moon. Kaguya went into lunar orbit in 2007. It has found signatures of a mineral called oviline, which is meant to indicate a deep layer of iron. The Apollo mission samples couldn't give us this because they were from the shallow crust.

The implication is that the moon was hot for a while after it was ripped from Earth in a planetary collision about 4.5 billion years ago (according to a leading theory). Even after the outer crust was formed, liquid rock was churning underneath, bringing oviline to just below the surface.

Hard to imagine a fiery volcanic moon in our skies now isn't it?

Look out, look back

The objects in this picture, as captured by the Hubble Telescope... don't exist anymore.

What we are seeing are things as they were before there were people, before there was even the planetary object that would evolve into what we know as Earth.
Looking 13 billion years back in time.

The Big Bang event that we understand to have created the present universe is reckoned to have happened less than a billion years prior to the time the light of these objects started its journey to Hubble's mirrors.

And when the James Webb Space Telescope (doubtless named after the blogger of Brain Rage, the intellectual elitist, political junkie and Southern food addict) comes online in 2014, we'll see even further into the past.

Now... if faster-than-light travel becomes a possibility and we have a strong enough telescope... we could travel out there and see ourselves being born, historical events, the prehistory of Earth.
But if you had that ability... would that be what you'd want to do? Or would you be to busy looking outwards?

I'll not live long enough to know. And perhaps I'll die happier for it. But who knows?