This week’s Horizon program, “Seeing Stars” was short on the science and long on fabulous photography of beautiful desert landscapes and large, complex pieces of engineering. It was all about some of the strange new ways astronomers are observing the cosmos. While the intellectual content was a bit low, there was one marvellous sense of wonder moment near the beginning. They programme was following some work at the high-altitude Very Large Telescope in the Atacama Desert. We are shown some pictures taken by the instrument. The narration went roughly like this:

That’s an area of about 300 by 100 light years, but if we zoom in on this particularly bright patch we get this picture. Here we can see a group of stars orbiting a bright object. That object is the accretion disk of hot gasses orbiting the super-massive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

Yeah. Cool.