A Predawn Triangulation

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him? (Psalm 8:3-4 ESV)

I am wont to ponder. Sometimes I can almost imagine God giving me a celestial wink (with a big grin on His face) when I try to locate my place in His universe (or even just in my universe, for that matter)...

In the mornings, as the world is coming to life, I man my post in the parking lot to direct a seemingly never-ending and hypnotic stream of headlights, while dodging buses and keeping an eye out for the ghost students who cross my path ephemerally before disappearing again into the herd making its way toward the school building. But at the onset, until 6:35 or so, there actually is some peace and tranquility, especially under a clear night sky being slowly erased by the predawn light.

Over the past couple of weeks I've noticed a triangle of three bright "stars" (looking south and a tad right, at about 2 o'clock-- see image below); only one of them is a star, Antares, a supergiant located 550 light-years from Earth. It boggles my mind to think that when I look this star in the sky, I'm looking at the light that left it in the mid 1400s, around the time one Johannes Gutenberg was working on the first-ever printed book (the Bible, of course...duh). Antares is so large, its surface would stretch from Mars to Jupiter! (It also has a companion star, visible with a telescope-- see image insets.) According to the Wikipedians, the name Antares derives from the Ancient Greek Άντάρης, meaning "equal to-Ares" ("equal to-Mars"), due to the similarity of its reddish hue to the appearance of the planet Mars.

The other two lights in the triangle are the planets Saturn and Mars, which are practically next door by comparison to the traveling distance to Antares of 3,233,244,047,686,625 miles; Mars is a day's drive at 48,678,219 miles, and Saturn might require a hotel room for the night on the way at 792,248,270 miles...

So I stand under the night sky as dawn creeps in over the eastern horizon and I ponder the weight of it all-- how small Man is in the face of God. Just to get across our Milky Way galaxy alone would take almost 100,000 years at light-speed. (i think my mental clutch cable just snapped...)

Even more perplexing is that on such a grand(iose) scale, Man has to be, proportionally, as minute to God as something even more minute than an atom is to Man. (Why would He even bother with a dust mote like me?!) (there goes the drive shaft...)

Anyway. Thankfully He has gifted me with a fool-proof GPS so the night sky lights and distances are not so daunting: faith.

Tomorrow morning I might even wink back. ;)

[P.S. Tomorrow begins the Willow Moon cycle in the Celtic lunar calendar for all you neo-pagans, Wiccans, and Druids on the fringe...]