star light star bright

There are few stars in our sky. Look up and you will find the moon hiding its lonely self in an obscure corner. Sometimes it may peer out from behind a building, otherwise it just sits and watches over the earth quietly. If you're lucky you will see a bright spot or two. These are stars. To many they will be looked at but not seen. We have the tendency to take them for granted.

How many have seen the entire night sky filled with stars? How many have laid eyes upon the magnificence of bright darkness? Imagine seeing more stars than you can count. Imagine turning your head this way and that, and finding no piece of sky not decorated with tiny spots of white. There is no unnatural light: the silhouette of entire forests are seen by star light alone.

Many are far away. Further than any man could ever reach within the constraints of time. Not enough time has elapsed since creation for man to even arrive at the closest star. Billions of billions of billions of miles separate us and these fiery balls of gas. Some are hundreds of times bigger than our own sun, yet the vast expanse of nothingness that exists between them and us have reduced these colossal giants to tiny, almost indiscernible specks. The two or three fingers we can fit between each star probably represents a distance so large it would take even light decades or even centuries to traverse. In fact, the very light that you enjoy on a clear night may have been emitted when the dinosaurs were roaming the earth.

Do you see the big dipper? It has been around since the beginning of time. Cultures have long recognised it as one of the major constellations. The Bible makes reference to it as well in Amos 5:8, "him that maketh the seven stars" and Orion." The brightest star in the bowl of the big dipper has for the past few 1500 years been the north star. It may well have been the same star that Christopher Columbus watched every night during his voyage to the new world. But stars definitely number more than we can see. What we observe is a pitiful fraction of the number of these giants that exist out there. Estimates place the number of stars at 10²⁴, or a few hundred times more than the number of grains of sand on the earth.

Somewhere in this vastness we stand, humbled by the sheer magnitude of the space we inhabit. It stretches the imagination to even begin to think of the size we have to measure with our scales of feet or miles. We will one day run out of numbers to describe our surroundings with, and maybe when that day comes we can finally sit back and enjoy the twinkling beauties.