Aug 31, 2011

Hubble


I've always had a fascination for astronomy, passed down from my father to my brother and me. We've got this small telescope that's sitting in the study room, it's only been used once - when I was around twelve we drove to this eerily dark place and set it up and watched Saturn. Beautiful multi-coloured ringed Saturn. And we kept having to adjust the telescope because it kept moving.

I remember looking at my dad's astronomy books in primary school. In fact, I also remember looking at books about space theory. I remember something about space being a flat plane, being bent / warped by objects that had mass, or gravity.

I loved the pictures of galaxies and nebulae.
This is the Orion Nebula. You know the three stars in a line that form the belt of Orion, the Hunter? There are another three stars diagonally down from that belt that form what they call the dagger, but the second 'star' in the dagger isn't really a star. It's a nebula. It's the Orion Nebula. Just a cloud of gas.

Watched Hubble at the Science Centre's IMAX theatre today.
YEAH IMAX!!!

It was just fascinating, going back to astronauts and space and space shuttles. There was a shot of a space shuttle and its interior and I thought, oh gosh, the toy model of the space shuttle my brother and I had when we were kids looked exactly like it. In fact, the image of my toy registered in my mind before I realised it was the actual space shuttle. I remembered my dreams of being an astronaut (yes, Seokhoon knows, he and Grace got me a notebook with an astronaut on the cover!) or at least working in the Space Centre or whatever. Being one of those making sure everything was going fine. Of course, all hopes of having anything to do with astronomy or space crashed when I realised I sucked at math and physics in secondary school.

But gosh, the pictures. They never fail to amaze.
Just look at that. Each bright thing is a galaxy. Hundreds of billions of stars within each speck of light you see in the picture, each star possibly with its own solar system. Planets. The Sun we know - the life-giving Sun that lights up our world every day - is just one star on an arm of our spiral Milky Way, 28,000 light years from the center of the galaxy, which contains about 400 billion stars. Sometimes our personal problems seem so huge. Our failures, our humiliation, they can all seem so huge. But look at us. We're so, so insignificantly small as compared to everything else. Look at the universe and its beauty. So many galaxies. An infinite number of stars.

God knows every one of them.

He knows you, too.


We saw the arm of the Milky Way, one of those nights in Telunas with the Exco. I wasn't sure if it really was that so I didn't scream about it to the rest of them, just Justin. It wasn't as spectacular as it might have been in complete darkness, but...the Telunas sky was so amazing. Breathtaking.


You placed the stars in the sky and You know them by name
You see the depths of my heart and You love me the same

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