Ten years ago LaVon bought me my first telescope (a 4″dobsonion reflector). This last week, after years of looking and dreaming, I bought a new telescope (an 8″ Meade LX90 Schmidt-Cassegrain I picked up on e-bay). The scope arrived on Friday, but I didn’t have time to set it up and try it out until tonight after worship. It was about 11:00 p.m. when I finally began taking a tour of the night sky.

I started with a visit to Mars. Then there was Saturn, which always makes my heart leap when I see its rings (and this time I was able to see two of its moons - something I had not seen before). From there it was on to a visit to several stars, and then finally to M13, the Hercules Globular Cluster.

To the naked eye M13 is just a faint star. But with a scope you can see what looks like a small pile of salt poured onto a black table. It contains hundreds of thousands of stars and it is about 22,000 light years away from Earth (yet still in our Milky Way Galaxy). Think of this - the light from those stars, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, took 22,000 years to arrive here! And this is one of our neighbors in our own Galaxy - it is estimated that our galaxy is just one of more than 100 billion total galaxies in the universe! Looking at the stars reminds me of the vastness of God’s domain - God is present, and watches over, the farthest reaches of the universe.

Looking at the planets and the stars tonight, I am reminded of the words of the Psalmist, in Psalm 8, “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what are mere mortals that you are mindful of them?” Most of us live as though the entire universe revolves around us, individually and as a planet. Yet the things we fret over, divide and debate over, and sometimes kill over, seem very small when looking at the stars through my telescope. I can’t help but wonder if they seem even smaller to God, who watches over and sustains the farthest reaches of the heavens.

I’ll close with a few lines written 3,000 years ago by another stargazer, in Psalm 19,

The heavens declare the glory of God;

the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Day after day they pour forth speech;

night after night they display knowledge.

They have no speech, they use no words;

no sound is heard from them.

Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,

their words to the ends of the world.