Telescopic and Microscopic . . .

Note: I haven't forgotten to post Darkness and Light – Part II. I just felt led to do this first.

Yesterday we were blessed to be able to take our girls to the beach in Cambria for a family day as summer draws to a close. One of my favorite things to do there is to lay on the "pebbly" beach and sort through the tiny rocks, marveling at the amazing colors and patterns and complexity in rocks so small you can barely hold them. Truly, if you don't actually lay down and get your nose next to the ground, you wouldn't even notice them.

One of my other favorite things to do is to browse the Hubble Space Telescope web site (see my November 12, 2009 post As High as the Heavens . . .) and download new pictures. Then I like to zoom in farther and farther in to them and be amazed at the stars (and galaxies!) that are but a dot in the picture . . . knowing the picture itself is but a dot in the sky.

Either way—microscopically looking at smaller and smaller details in already tiny rocks, or telescopically looking at more and more details in photographs of deep space—it is amazing to me how majestic and powerful and complex our Creator is. He is truly, beyond all else, worthy of our worship and praise and awe. I am struck as I look at the details, from a scale so grand I can't even fathom the numbers used to describe it, to a scale so small I need microscopes to appreciate it, that this is the God I have trusted my life to . . . and I know I am in good and capable hands.

I have shared two photo "journeys" with you below so that you can share a little of this with me. The first is from a photograph I took yesterday of a tiny part of the beach. The second is from the Hubble, showing star cluster NGC 265. In both cases, the white box inside the picture shows the area the image to the right of it is zoomed in on (i.e., the middle black box is the area inside the white square on the left, and the far right black box is the area inside the white square in the middle picture). Whether looking a pebbles on the sand at a tinier and tinier lever, or going deeper and deeper into an increasingly narrow slice of space, isn't our God  truly wonderful, amazing, magnificent, awe inspiring . . . indescribable?

Click on image to enlarge.

Click on image to enlarge.

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.)