The Heavens Declare the Glory of the Lord

Psalm 19:1 states:

The heavens declare the glory of God; 

the skies proclaim the glories of his hand.

Sadly, we've lost some of the beauty of the night sky with the light pollution that comes with any community of size, but at least in Iowa, we don't need to go far to reach dark skies and see that the heavens do indeed declare the glory of God. When the skies are dark enough to show the Milky Way as it reaches across the sky, we begin to learn the limits of our feeble selves and the true measure and majesty of the Lord.

I'll use two images. This first is a globular cluster known as M13. It can be found near the zenith in the summer very near the bright star Vega in the constellation Lyra.

Globular clusters are located on the plane of the Milky Way (and other galaxies) and are compact, gravitationally bound groups of thousands of stars. Don't rush out to see it now, or even when the skies are clear--this little beauty is NOT visible to the human eye, and even in smaller telescopes, is little more than a blur. 

The M in M13 stands for Charles Messier, a French astronomer of the 18th Century. He established a reference chart of objects that other astronomers wouldn't mistake for a comet, and this is the 13th (of 110) that Messier identified in the Northern Hemisphere. Prior to the invention of the telescope in the 1600s, and of larger instruments in the 1700s and 1800s (Galileo's first instrument was little stronger than a pair of common binoculars), these items were unknown to human eyes. They had existed in the skies for millenia and were completely unknown. When I read that the heavens declare the glory of God, it describes things of beauty that we haven't even seen yet, which goes a tiny way in establishing my definition of God--something that is TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY beyond my reckoning or understanding.

Kind of like this. This picture is known as the Hubble Deep Space Field, so named because it was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope early in its mission.

To begin, our Milky Way galaxy is hypothesized to contain about 250 billion stars (of which our sun is considered quite average, and placed on the outer periphery), and it is estimated that there are approximately 250 billion galaxies in the universe. We're getting quite close to the point where numbers begin to lose any meaning (I'm being generous--when discussing anything on the scale of the universe, our minds simply cannot comprehend the vastness involved). You'll see a white dot in the middle left third of the picture with spikes--that's the ONE AND ONLY star in this picture--every other oblong, point, smudge or other point of light is another galaxy JUST AS BIG AS OURS. You need to stop a moment and contemplate the vastness of what I'm describing. Just to add complete insult to injury, here are some more numbers:

--a light year is the distance light travels in year

186,000 miles/sec*60 sec/min*60 min/hour*24 hours/day*365 days/yr=

5,865,696,000,000 miles in a year

--the distance between the Milky and the next nearest galaxy (the Andromeda) is approximately 2,000,000 light years, or

117,313,920,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles (I might be off a zero)

We could say this as 117 million million million miles

--the kicker--there's that much space between EVERY SINGLE POINT OF LIGHT in the picture, and that pictures covers such a small percentage of the sky that I can't even describe it (I'm talking in the millionths of a percent, if not less)

And our God is bigger than all of this. He is more than all of this, and he created all of this. The heavens do indeed declare the glory of the Lord.

Scott