A sight to remember

Last night our neighbors, Mike and I saw something we'll not soon forget. Around 9 p.m., we watched as the Space Shuttle made its way from the northwest sky to the southeast.

Our neighbors told us about the appearance of the shuttle in last night's sky. They had heard on the TV news that it would be visible at 9:01 p.m. We spotted it a few minutes before that. At first it looked like a reddish-colored star, and we wondered if we were looking at the right thing, but it didn't take long to notice it was moving quickly -- very quickly -- across the night sky. The shuttle has to move at 17,500 miles an hour to keep orbiting Earth. We saw a second white light behind it, following at the same speed and in the same orbit. I've done some research since last night and found out what we saw was actually the International Space Station (the first reddish light we saw), with the Space Shuttle (the dimmer, white light) following behind it. A few minutes later, the shuttle and space station disappeared to our eyes.

As we watched, it amazed me that the shuttle was millions of miles away, and we were watching it orbiting the earth. (It orbits the earth once every 90 minutes or so. For more facts about the shuttle, go here.) It amazed me that people were up there, with a view of Earth few of us will ever see or comprehend. What amazes me now is that those same people are home tonight, subject again to the law of gravity. The shuttle entered Earth's atmosphere this morning and landed safely at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida despite some problems with this latest mission. And wow, to think that the shuttle was up there last night in the vastness of space, and it had to come home early to avoid any danger posed by Hurricane Dean. I'll bet the astronauts saw the hurricane from space -- it probably looked like a blob of swirling clouds around the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.

The vastness of the universe compared to our little corner of it is too much for my mind to grasp. Seeing the Space Shuttle last night reminded me of how big God is -- and how amazing it is that He has His hand on astronauts in a tiny vessel, tiny compared to Him anyway, and people like us on the ground marveling at it all.