On a recent clear night I was stargazing with my telescope (an 8″ Meade LX90) and began to focus on the Andromeda Galaxy.  For some reason I’ve been unable to stop thinking about the experience, or at least my reflections on it, since.

The Andromeda Galaxy is our closest galactic neighbor - it is the nearest galaxy to our own Milky Way.  It is somewhat larger than our galaxy (as many as one trillion stars compared to the 200 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy).  The two galaxies are moving towards one another at the rate of 70 miles per second and it is believed that in 2.5 billion years they will collide and merge to form a huge new galaxy.

On a dark night you can see the Andromeda Galaxy with the naked eye - it appears to be a faint star.  With my telescope and a 12.4 mm plossl lens the galaxy appears as a gray cloud with a brighter center that nearly fills the lens.

Here’s what I can’t shake - this, our closest neighbor, is 2.5 million light years away - so that the light I see as I look at of the Andromeda Galaxy through my telescope - left that galaxy before human beings existed as a species.  Somehow this lends a certain  perspective on life - on human being.  It reminds me how vast space is - our closest neighbor in what is called our “local group” is so far away that light, travelling at 186,000 miles per second took 2.5 million years to get here!  Its one trillion stars remind me that our one sun is a very small speck in the cosmos, our planet is one much smaller speck in our solar system, and I am an absurdly small speck on this planet!

It is somehow good for my soul to be reminded of how small I am - and how small we are as a species.  The issues we think are so important - the fine points of theology, doctrine, even politics - may not be nearly so important to God.  At the same time a look in my telescope leads me to marvel that the God who created the vastness of our universe actually knows each of us by name and genuinely cares for us.  That leads me with the Psalmist to say, “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.”

Here’s an image of the Andromeda Galaxy: