As High as the Heavens . . .

This collection of five photos from the Hubble Space Telescope is awesome and I wanted to share it with you! (I love just cruising the Hubble site and looking in wonder on what God has created, and I have over a gigabyte of photos from them on my hard drive! I put a link to the Hubble site below.)

The Bible says that the heavens declare the glory of our God and the heavens are, indeed, massive and glorious beyond our ability to fathom or comprehend. I tried to keep this picture small enough to not clog your internet, but large enough for you to see some detail. Try clicking on it to enlarge it and see if that helps. For the image in this post I brought their 5-picture sequence into a draw program and put in the arrows to help it make sense. In a nutshell, in each case the "next" picture in the sequence is an enlargement of the small square in the previous picture. So, if you follow it across and then down, the last picture is probably not even a visible fraction of the first picture! And this is all in just one tiny slice of the sky we could probably cover with our tiniest finger nail! Wow, when Isaiah writes, "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" (Is 55:9) it really makes us pause and wonder!

Our family has been watching a lot of Creation videos lately and one thing that really comes through in them is just how immense our known universe is. There are billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy alone, and there are billions of galaxies, each with their own collection of billions of stars . . . and as the heavens are higher than earth (higher than we can even fathom!) so are His ways and thoughts higher than ours! It really gives us some pause for thought. What comfort to know I am trusting my life to a God so huge and wonderful and glorious! (Note: as of 1999 the Hubble Space Telescope people were estimating there were 125 billion galaxies . . . and that was 10 years ago!) I find that if I can keep the size of things like this in perspective in my mind the things in this life that seem really big to me often just shrink as a result.

Enjoy the picture! Let me know if you like this and I can share some more of my favorite Hubble pictures. If you want to cruise the Hubble site (awesome pictures, not so accurate date estimates) the link to a good starting page is: http://www.spacetelescope.org/bin/images.pl?searchtype=bestof . I also have posted quite a few of my favorites on our church web site in the Photo Gallery section in an album called, "The Heavens Declare."

(Also, you may have noticed, I added a few fun widgets to the blog that should be neat to watch as the blog grows. One is a live activity feed which shows where people are visiting from. There is also one that shows the most recent comments. At the bottom of each post a widget now suggests other posts I've done that it senses are similar and that might interest you if that one did, and there is another that shows some of the different tags that I have used for posts. You can click on any of the tags shown and it will show you other posts which have that same tag. Let me know how you like these widgets, I thought they were fun.)