Earthrise

I've had no takers, no one sharing their own "meaningless little 'springs of delight'"... so I'm asking again, what cosmically-small sorts of things delight you? 

Earthrise is cosmic, though small. It's also on my Delight list.

It is perhaps the most famous photograph ever taken. It came into being almost by accident, when on the morning of Christmas Eve 1968 one of the astronauts aboard the Apollo 8 spacecraft, Bill Anders, turned the camera from the supposed object of their mission – the moon – towards a spherical, brightly glowing, blue object rising above the lunar horizon. This was Earth, our irreplaceable planetary home. Suddenly humankind was able to view its habitat with a gaze hitherto reserved for the entity we have termed God.

It was a moment that invited and continues to offer us a fundamental change in perspective. Although the theory that the earth was a sphere had been proposed by ancient Greek thinkers from Pythagoras onwards, such thinking remained theoretical for hundreds more years, and still remains today, as we make our way laboriously around our streets, mountains and seas, largely implausible.

Though the Earth typically appears inexhaustibly vast to us, suddenly it emerged as what it truly is: just another medium-sized planet in one solar system, in one galaxy, in a mind-defyingly infinite universe. Though it might seem far for an earth-dweller to journey from NY to Sydney, or from one pole to another, these are, in the greater scheme, the trails of an ant... (SoL/BoL, continues)