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accompany morning prayer with a visit to the site. For a brief glimpse of the visual feast that awaits anyone similarly inclined, let me suggest four recent gems, available at the "archive" tab at apod.nasa.gov. On April 25, APOD and the Hubble Space Telescope offered a bril- liantly-hued panorama of the "Cosmic Reef " within the Large Magel- lanic Cloud, 160,000 light years away. On May 15, APOD featured two dancing galaxies 12 million light years away, which, as the brief expla- nation following the striking image notes, "have been locked in gravita- tional combat for a billion years" – a dance that "in the next few billions years" will lead to a cosmic merger. On June 1, APOD introduced me to the "whirlwind of spectacular star formation" happening within the Lagoon Nebula, captured in resplendent magenta by Hubble at a dis- tance of 5,000 light years. And then there was the most extraordinary of this lot: Hubble's daz- zling color portrait of the "Porpoise Galaxy," which APOD posted on May 10. The description of how this fantastic phenomenon came about is worth quoting: "Just a few hundred million years ago, NGC 2936, the upper of the two galaxies shown, was likely a normal spiral galaxy – spin- ning, creating stars – and minding its own business. But then it got too close to the massive elliptical galaxy NGC 2937…and took a dive. Dubbed the porpoise galaxy for its…shape, NGC 2936 is not only being deflected but also being distorted by the close gravitational interaction. A burst of young blue stars forms the nose of the porpoise….while the center of the spiral appears as an eye. Alternatively, the galaxy pair…look to some look to some like a penguin protecting an egg." Whatever. Porpoise or penguin, it's breathtakingly beautiful. The marvels archived at APOD suggest more than the possibility of a post-mortem galactic Grand Tour, however. They suggest that the burden of proof ought to be on those who insist that all this grandeur is mere randomness: the accidental by-products of a Big Bang from which what we now know as "the universe" was born. Really? Just an accident, if a happy accident? But while we're on the subject, how did the Big Bang, so to speak, bang? And if what we know as "the universe" evolved from that primordial eruption, what accounts for the high-density, high-tem- perature primal material that burst into an expanding universe? To suggest that it, too, was an accident, something that just happened, begs a host of questions: beginning with, how can something come from nothing? The notion that we live in an accidental universe, one that need not be, has had ugly effects in modern history. It suggests that we're acci- dents, too, mere embodied stardust. That dumbed-down notion of the human has underwritten a lot of the awfulness of the last two centuries. Astronomy Picture of the Day hints at a different story: none of this is accidental and thus ultimately meaningless. And that includes you, me, and all those who study the heavens and give us the gift of their work.