What You Can't See

Jim Guthrie is a retired Presbyterian pastor/chaplain with an untiring passion for the hobby of astronomy. He and his wife, Mae, hosted a small group of dinner guests on an early January evening and for the after-dinner entertainment we bundled up against the cold and trekked out in twos to peek through his backyard telescope. What a show! We found Jupiter and its moons, Saturn and its rings, several nebulae, Orion, Cassiopeia, and "our sister galaxy," Andromeda. We only had time for the briefest glance, yet I learned, or was reminded of, so much. What I was most taken by was when Jim focused the telescope on the area of the sky with the "seven sisters" grouping of stars also known as Pleiades. We spent some time picking out the stars with our eyes, and then looked through the telescope. Suddenly our eyes were opened: in that small grouping, you could see hundreds of more stars that you can't begin to see with the naked eye.

The Pleiades is one of the brightest and most visible open clusters in the sky, is 400 light years away with over 3000 stars. (And in case you've forgotten just how long a light year is, it is the distance light travels in one year, which is about 6 trillion miles or over 12 million round-trips to the Moon.) At least six member stars are visible to the naked eye, and the theory is that there used to be a seventh star visible, which faded. (But even a pair of good binoculars will make additional stars visible in this cluster.)

An interesting footnote is that in Japanese, the Seven Sisters are called Subaru - which is where the car got its name. Many cultures have tales and folklore involving this cluster, which is easy to understand, since it is visible without a telescope. Pleiades is mentioned several times in the Bible, including(Job 9:9), where Job reflects on the Big Dipper, Orion, and the Pleiades by name.

With the Psalmist, we marvel, "The heavens keep telling the wonders of God." In fact, if you read all ofPsalm 19, you have to think that David was out on the hills, where light pollution was practically non-existent, observing the ever-moving, changing stars and constellations as he wrote: "Each day informs the following day; each night announces to the next. They don't speak a word, and there is never the sound of a voice. Yet their message reaches all the earth, and it travels around the world. In the heavens a tent is set up for the sun. It rises like a bridegroom and gets ready like a hero eager to run a race. It travels all the way across the sky." The stars must have been like a gigantic movie screen for ancient peoples and hence the stories they developed around the figures they saw there.

If there are worlds that are "out there" beyond what we can see, that are beyond our physical sight limitations, why is it so hard for us to believe that there are realms of being and understanding beyond our intellectual limitations? Even this small emersion into the "cosmos" takes me once again to greater faith in the God we cannot see nor totally understand.

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Contributed by Melodie Davis from her weekly columnANOTHER WAY (http://www.thirdway.com/aw/).For information on using Another Way in a local newspaper, contact:ANOTHER WAY, 1251 Virginia Ave., Harrisonburg, VA 22801-2497; or call1-800-999-3534; fax at 540-434-5556; or email me at:Melodie@mennomedia.org