This past weekend my family and I along with our good friends Bill and Diane Zurawell and their two boys as well as Laura's mom and dad, visited Dinosaur Provincial Park near Brooks Alberta. At night the skies, beautiful and clear for the most part, displayed for us the magnificent spectacle of the Milky Way Galaxy. I heard, or read somewhere that the human eye can only detect about 3000 stars on a good night. I don't know if it's true, because when you look up on a perfectly clear night with almost no source of light near you and see so many stars......it's not true because I'll bet you can see tens of thousands. I went out for a walk on my own one night for about an hour, quite a distance from our campsite, where my eyes could adjust to the darkness after about ten minutes and I'll tell you it makes you feel tinier than a grain of sand. Our Milky Way can put on quite a show! Now multiply that by a few hundred trillion or more and you come up with our universe - WOW!!
You can even see some very faint green and red aurora borealis which my eyes could not detect, but that the minute long exposure brought out. Remember to click on the image to make it larger.
[Canon 5D, 24mm f2 Nikkor]
God, brilliant Lord,
I look up at your macro-skies, dark and enormous,
Your handmade sky-jewelery,
Moon and stars mounted in their settings.
Then I look at my micro-self and wonder,
Why do you bother with us?
Why take a second look our way?
Psalms 8:1,3-4 (The Message)
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