Comet NEOWISE
I've quite got into astrophotography. We live in an area that is much darker at night than where we previously lived in town, although surprisingly (and annoyingly) still lighter than I would have hoped. However, with the right settings the camera will capture an awful lot. Trying to get the picture above started me off, of course, and I have written about that before (but this time the photograph is my own). But I've found that there is so much more!
Getting the settings right took a few evenings of practice, but I can now both focus properly and get enough light in without too much motion of the stars elongating the images. Then turn the camera towards the Milky Way and voila!
The more you look at this picture, the more little dots you see. I'm sure that with a bit more practice I would be able to capture even more, but this is just a small portion of the Milky Way. Our whole Milky Way galaxy contains around 100 billion stars and there is about the same number of whole galaxies outside that. Everything about the Universe it is vast. But that's not all!
If I asked you how big God is and you said, "Infinite," then I would ask how you could so underestimate him. Start counting. 1, 2, 3, 4 ... Stop when you get to infinity. OK, don't bother! I would rather that you carry on reading than take time out to count for ever. Now consider all the numbers between zero and one: there are all the proper fractions (1/2, 3/7 etc) as well as those numbers like π, which cannot be written in full as a decimal, but just go on for ever and ever with more decimal places. There is actually an infinite number of numbers like this between zero and one - and that infinity is larger than the infinity associated with counting in 1s for ever, as we started to do earlier. In fact, there are mathematical ways of showing that there is an infinity of different-sized infinities. I think that's cool.
That is also about how big God is - not just as big as the number of stars in our galaxy or as big as all the stars in all the galaxies, not just infinite, but as big as an infinity of infinities. No wonder we can trust him.
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