The galaxy on the top left of the certificate is an irregular galaxy like the Large and Small Magellanic Cloud, which are small sister satellite galaxies around our own Milky Way. They are called the Magellanic Clouds because they are associated with Ferdinand Magellan's circumnavigation of the Earth in 1519, which surely put him far enough south of the Equator to see them.

The galaxy on top right is the beautiful and unusual Sombrero Galaxy, which is neither a spiral galaxy nor an elliptical galaxy. I have chosen these two images for the certificate to represent the incredible variety of the visible universe even at the galactic scale of billions of stars. Just as each human being has a distinct DNA, so too does each galaxy have a distinct morphology.

All astronomical objects are known to astronomers by one or many catalog numbers, such as NGC 6925, shown in this certificate. NGC is an acronym for the New General Catalog, which was published in 1888 and remains a standard catalog for archiving galaxies. Another widely used catalog is the Messier Catalog, published in 1771.

"We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself" is a quote from Brian Cox, an astrophysicist and world-renowned science educator. What I believe Cox is saying is that the universe is very much alive. We exist in the universe and the universe exists in us. Everything on our world, including our physical bodies, is made up of atoms that originated from stars that exploded billions of years ago. We are star children, made of the very stuff of stars.