Photo courtesy of
NASA.
If you're like me, you enjoy looking up into the heavens on a clear,
moonless night, marveling at the seemingly countless stars shining
through the darkness. As a youngster, I would often lie on a blanket
out in the yard, staring up at the night sky wondering just how many
stars God had put up there...
Well, as it turns out He put a lot more of them "up there" than we
can see with our naked eye - or even with the most powerful
telescopes ever built for that matter. When we gaze up at the
heavens, we can only see a little over 8,000 stars from the earth's
surface. Now 8,000 might sound like a large number, but when we
consider that there are billions of galaxies in the universe - each
of which contains billions of stars, we realize that the ones we can
see with our naked eyes aren't simply a "drop in the bucket",
they're actually like a drop of water in all the oceans covering the
face of the earth combined!
Like His love, God's power has no limit. When He created the
heavens, I believe He did it with us in mind. I believe He put the
stars and galaxies in place to give us something beautiful to look
at on clear nights. I also believe that He made the universe as
immense as it is in order to challenge us to keep learning all we can about
it. I don't think we earthlings will ever have the ability to see
the entire universe from our terrestrial vantage point, but God is
allowing us to build ever-more powerful telescopes with which to see
more and more of it!
About the photo: In February 2005 and January 2006, the amazing
Hubble Space Telescope captured a number of images which were
then combined to produce this stunning composite image of Galaxy
Cluster Abell S0740, a group of galaxies and individual stars
that are gravitationally "bound together" at a whopping distance of 450 million
light years from earth. To put the number of
stars we can see with our naked eye in perspective, the large
elliptical galaxy located slightly above and to the right of center
in the photo is ESO 325-G004 - which by itself contains
approximately 100 billion stars!
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