The Heavens Declare

¹The heavens declare the glory of God,
   and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
²Day to day pours out speech,
   and night to night reveals knowledge.
³There is no speech, nor are there words,
   whose voice is not heard.
⁴Their voice goes out through all the earth,
   and their words to the end of the world.
~ Psalm 19:1-4

I just recently ran across this beautiful time-lapse video of the earth from the International Space Station. In it you can see the lights of our cities, lightning flashing in storms, the Aurora Borealis, and so much more. It is glorious reminder to me of the beautiful design in our universe and how the heavens truly do declare the glory of God.



If you want a reservoir of images, check out my Space Images Picasa Web Album. I have collected images and captions from all over the web. I add to it anytime I come across an image I find particularly striking.

Also, one of my most popular posts has been "Mote of Dust in a Sunbeam," which is a size comparison to show you just how small you really are in this universe of God's handiwork.

By His Grace,
Taylor

Little People, Big Universe, Even Bigger God

"That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives... lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." ~ Carl Sagan

In a couple of past posts (here and here) I showed some images of our universe that demonstrated just how small Earth is in the grand scheme of the universe. The American Museum of Natural History has created a video that starts at the top of the world (Everest) and moves out to the farthest observed edge of our universe. It is a great example of just how small Earth is (and, by extension, you and I).



The universe is 156 billion light-years across! Makes me feel kind of small when I think about it. Fortunately, God holds all this in His hand and He likes me a lot.

By His Grace,
Taylor

Update to "Mote of Dust in a Sunbeam"

This is an abnormal post, I know, but I wanted to update a previous post. Back in September I quoted Carl Sagan and then presented a brief series of photos to show just how small we are in the grand scheme of the universe. I ended the photo series with the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) image. I noted that this was the deepest into the universe anyone had ever seen. At the time I would have argued that this image was the most important image in astronomical history. Now, however, that has changed. With its new Wide Field Camera 3, the Hubble recently recorded an even deeper image of the universe that required a much shorter exposure time (only 4 days as opposed to 11 for the HUDF). This new camera allows the Hubble to catch light nearer the infrared region of the spectrum. That may not sound like anything special but because of the expansion of the universe light from great distances is "reddened", which means that the wavelength of the light is stretched out as space expands pushing the light towards the infrared region. Since this new camera can detect light nearer the infrared it can catch the light from objects farther away than before. Below is what I call the NEW Ultra Deep Field image from the Hubble:
More amazing discoveries will come when the James Webb Space telescope launches in 2014. Then we will get an even better idea of how small we really are. That is okay though because, as I said in the previous post, God holds all this in His hands and He likes me a whole lot.

By His Grace,
Taylor

Mote of Dust in a Sunbeam

"That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives... lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." ~ Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan said this when observing a photo taken by Voyager in 1990 as it exited our solar system, nearly four billion miles away. "Mote of dust" however, makes the earth sound far too large in the grand scheme of the universe. Shall we take a look?

This is Earth as seen from the moon, taken by the Apollo astronauts. Looks fairly large still:

This is Earth compared to our Sun, a small and fairly insignificant star when compared to most:

This is the image that Carl Sagan was commenting on when he said the above. This is Earth from about 4 billion miles away, a tiny spec of light in a sunbeam (it is the pale blue spec between the two lines):

If that does not make it look small enough, consider this size comparison. The Milky Way contains about 100 billion stars (of which our Sun is only one, a small one) and they are nothing but specs of light that make up the galaxy. Below is an image of the Pinwheel Galaxy, a galaxy not too dissimilar from our own. I have marked with a red dot where our solar system would be if this was our galaxy. The dot is not to scale, of course, if it were you would not be able to see it:

Finally, in 2004 the Hubble Space telescope stared for 11 days at a rather boring patch of sky, collecting light. The image it recorded, however, is anything but boring. It recorded what is known as the Ultra Deep Field image. It is the farthest ever seen into the universe. In this image there are more than 10,000 galaxies, some larger than ours and some smaller. Each dot in the image is a galaxy, each galaxy contains billions of stars:

See what I mean when I say that "mote of dust" makes Earth sound too large in the grand scheme of the universe? The universe's radius is 46 billion light-years. That is 2.7×10²³ miles. Makes me feel kind of small when I think about it. Fortunately, God holds all this in His hand and He likes me a lot.

By His Grace,
Taylor