We are but specks of dust

Photo credit: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap060321.html

This photo is of a cluster of galaxies. Yes, you read that right, GALAXIES! When I first saw this picture I didn’t think much of it. But then I really thought about it and was simply blown away. A galaxy is huge and this is a cluster of them! I wondered, how much space are we looking at here? Let’s try to put this in perspective. Michigan (where I live) is about 400 miles (640 km) wide, New York to Los Angeles is 2500 miles (4000 km), the diameter of the earth is 8,000 miles (12, 900 km), the distance from the earth to the moon is 240,000 miles (386,200 km), the distance from the earth to the sun is 93,000,000 miles (149,600,000 km), the distance from the sun to Pluto is 3.67 billion miles (5.9 billion km), and finally the diameter of our galaxy, the milky way, is 100,000 light years. Sounds like a small number until you know what just one light year is, 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km). Wow! So what we are looking at is millions of light years of distance in this photo! And to think, that this is just a zoomed in portion of the entire universe! Simply incredible. It makes one think of the awesome and endless power of God. How vast His creation is and how small we really are. Just a speck…a tiny, tiny speck, in His created Universe. But yet He calls us precious and loves us to no end. What a wonderful and powerful God we have!

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