I want to alert everyone to an amazing website that should be visited every day. I turn to it each morning before or after my morning prayer (from the monthly magazine Magnificat, which I heartily endorse).
It is “Astronomy Picture of the Day“, a NASA production featuring astonishing photos of stars, galaxies, planets, nebulas, and other celestial phenomena. Find it at apod.nasa.gov. Bookmark it in your Favorites or wherever. It has photos from telescopes around the world and in orbit, from Hubble and other satellites, and from simple earthbound cameras. Not only distant galaxies but beautiful auroras and eclipses, and everything in between. There is an archive arrow-button on the left side at the bottom, so you can click through a nearly endless gallery of their past pictures.
I cannot imagine how APOD would fail to trigger a spiritual sense of awe at some level; at least a tingle.
This is two galaxies colliding and merging, 250 million light years away from us. The top photo shows a galaxy 65 million light years away. When the light from these galaxies began the trip to us, dinosaurs walked the earth!
Some time ago I was corresponding with a friend and confided that I was beginning to think about God. His response was that he thought the universe was too big, too grand to include something as small and local as a deity, especially a man-centered one. I didn’t know how to respond.
I thought of Psalm 8, “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him?”
It cut no ice; my friend thought the grandeur of the stars was wholly natural and self-explaining, and way too big for a tribal bronze-age god.
I wish I had thought to point out that the entire universe, unimaginably immense, was once so small that we could hold it in our hands; that the proto-Big Bang creation moment is completely inexplicable to science; that the universe is only comprehensible as part of an expansion process that stretches outward from the infinitesimal.
And I should have pointed out the mysterious human ability to appreciate the beauty of the skies; no evolutionary theory explains our sense of awe when we gaze at the night sky.
And I wish I had known about APOD back then.
“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.”
In saner times, Psalm 19:1 would be the motto of NASA.
O Ben Finiti 