Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about science, awe, wonder and tackling the future like the right kind of idiot.

Staying with last edition’s consideration of the terrible but oddly comforting vastness of geological time, behold this brain-melter of a thing:

It’s a composite of images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which is spending the next 10 years scanning the night sky to reveal it in the most incredible detail.

Take the very first image, which the following pictures dizzyingly zoom out from.

First, you can see stars in what I’m laughingly going to refer to as the “foreground” (they’re still quadrillions of miles away). These are some of the brightest objects within the Milky Way galaxy we’re part of, with the furthest being around 27,000 light years distant.

Behind them is the 50-60 million light year distance to the Virgo Cluster of around 1,300 galaxies, some of which you can see as much larger spirals, with three of them merging together like creamer in a coffee cup in the upper right…

And behind all those, in ginormously deeper space, you can see galaxies so far away that some may not even exist anymore because of the colossal amount of time that their light - this light, the light we’re seeing in these images here - has taken to reach us.

Yet - all that is just a tiny, tiny part of our night sky. You could cover it with your thumb at arm’s length. As part of the total, it’s basically nothing.

Ye gawds. There’s just so much out there.

If your mind can take it, you can find more images like that at Scientific American’s Best Space Photos of 2025.

At the end of this month, it’ll be five years since I started Everything Is Amazing, so it feels like a good time to shake things up a bit.

In a few days, our next season begins - here’s what we’re mainly looking at, and also this.

But I also wanted to share a few updates on the bigger projects I’m working on behind the scenes - starting with a book idea I first had while sleeping in a ditch after a long day hugging ancient stones, which is both true AND exactly the kind of origin story I want for all my work going forward.

Let's dive in...