© 1997 NASA

The cover picture of this book was taken from the Hubble Space Telescope. It depicts young, ultra-bright stars nested in their embryonic cloud of glowing gases. This celestial maternity ward is known simply as 'N81', and it is located 200,000 light-years away in the 'Small Magellanic Cloud' (SMC), an irregular satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. Tightly packed within the nebula's core, a mere 10 light-years in diameter - a distance only slightly more than twice that between earth and the nearest star to our sun - lie 50 separate stars. This dramatic picture reveals the swirling shapes sculpted in the nebula's wall of glowing gases by violent stellar winds and shock waves. It is presented here, courtesy of NASA.

Such galactic events were much more common billions of years ago in the early universe when most star formations took place. This picture serves to show the nature of the celestial fireworks that herald the beginning of a new galaxy. We were all born from stardust such as this. The reader is asked to bear this image in mind when the book talks about the enormous power at play during the early stages of God's creation.

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