God of the Heavens
1. Stars
Genesis 1:14-18 And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good.
2. Sun
The Sun is the most familiar object in the sky. Located 93 million miles away from us, it is an incredibly huge ball of burning gas, one million times larger than planet Earth. The Sun is so powerful that in one second it emits more energy than man has produced since time began.
3. Solar prominence
The Sun, which we depend on for life and warmth here on Earth, is actually an enormous hydrogen bomb in continuous explosion. This flame shooting from the surface is known as a solar prominence and is one million miles long.
4. Solar eclipse
Occasionally, our Moon moves directly between us and the Sun, blocking out its light and heat. Darkness falls over the Earth and for a short time we can envision the consequences if God allowed the Sun to stop shining. It’s no wonder that solar eclipses terrified people of more primitive times.
5. Mercury
Our Sun is surrounded by a family of nine planets. This is Mercury, the one closest to the Sun. As you can imagine, it gets pretty hot on Mercury. The side of the planet which faces the Sun reaches 800° F, but the night-side temperature plunges to -300°.
6. Venus
Venus is the next closest planet to the Sun. It is covered with dense clouds, which makes the planet highly reflective. Venus is thus the brightest light in the heavens next to the Sun and the Moon. It is not a very nice place, however. The clouds trap the heat, creating an enormous greenhouse effect on planet Venus. Soviet space probes have plunged into the Venusian atmosphere and found that the temperature there is hot enough to melt lead, and the atmospheric pressure is 90 times greater than the Earth’s.
7. Earth
Job 26:7 He spreads out the northern skies over empty space; he suspends the earth over nothing.
Isaiah 40:22 He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in.
Notice that though the Bible’s language is non-technical, it is accurate nonetheless.
8. Mars
We move outward from Earth to the planet Mars, the Red Planet. The surface of Mars is a dry, arid desert with mountains three times higher than Mt. Everest and canyons that make the Grand Canyon look like a mere ditch in comparison.
9. Jupiter
500 million miles from the Sun spins the King of the Planets. Jupiter is the largest of the four gas giants - planets so named because they are mainly gaseous in composition. Some people have called Jupiter a sun which didn’t quite make it. Jupiter is 1000 times larger than earth. It is incredibly cold there, and its gaseous surface is swept by monstrous storms. The great Red Spot of Jupiter is actually a gigantic hurricane which has been swirling for hundreds of years.
10. Saturn
Saturn is the ringed planet, almost 1 billion miles away from the Sun. It is perhaps the most beautiful of the planets. Because it is so far away, it is the last of the planets visible to the naked eye. The other planets are Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. The Voyager 2 space probe has already given us our first close-up view of Uranus, and will be flying past Neptune in September 1989.
11. Deep Space
When we move out into deep space beyond our Solar System, we begin to speak of distance in terms of light years. A light year is the distance that light, which travels at a rate of 186,282 miles per second, can cover in a year. This works out to about 6 trillion miles. To cover this distance in a Boeing 747 would take 38,000 years by comparison.
12. Stars
The closest star to our Solar System is called Proxima Centauri. It is 4.2 light years, or 25 trillion miles away from Earth. In spite of their distance, there are thousands of stars visible to the naked eye. With a small hand telescope, that number increases to hundreds of thousands, and from an observatory, there are millions and millions of stars visible.
Jeremiah 33:22 …as countless as the stars of the sky…
Radio astronomy has opened up our horizons beyond the limits of visibility to show us that there are incredibly distant objects out there which we cannot see, but which emit radio waves.
13. Stars
Genesis 15:5 He took Abraham outside and said, “Look up at the heavens and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”
14. Red stars
With a casual glance upward on a clear night, you might think that all the stars are pretty much the same. But stars come in an incredible variety of sizes and colors.
1 Corinthians 15:41 The sun has one kind of splendor, the moon another and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendor.
Some stars are monsters. They are called the Red Giants. One of them, Betelgeuse, which is 520 light years away is actually 800 times larger than our Sun. You can see Betelgeuse in our winter night sky in the constellation Orion. The red glow in this picture is from red stars in the constellation Sagitarius.
15. Blue stars
Other stars are small and incredibly hot. They are called the Blue Dwarfs. Some of them reach temperatures of forty million degrees. The blue glow in this picture is from blue stars.
16. Ring nebula
Some of the most beautiful sights are the nebulae. These are clouds of interstellar gas and dust. This one has at its very center one of the hottest stars known to man. This nebula is 1 light year across and 5000 light years away from earth.
17. Crab nebula
Some stars explode with fabulous brilliance. They are called Supernova. This nebula is all that remains of a star which exploded in 1054 AD. Chinese astronomers recorded the event for us. At the center of this nebula now is a strange little object called a pulsar. Astronomers believe that it is all that remains of the exploded star. It is only 10 miles in diameter, but it emits super powerful radio waves, and has a mass many times that of our Sun. One teaspoonful of this object would weigh several million tons.
18. Orion
The ancients studied the stars. Without telescopes or sophisticated electronic equipment, they patiently observed the drama in the heavens above them and learned much. The author of the book of Job shows that he knows his astronomy when he writes:
Job 38:31-33 “Can you bind the beautiful Pleiades? Can you loose the cords of Orion? Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons or lead out the Bear with its cubs? Do you know the laws of the heavens? Can you set up God’s dominion over the earth?
For all their stargazing however, the ancients came to wrong conclusions. Rather than worshiping the God who made the stars, they worshiped the Sun and planets and stars as though they were gods themselves. That is why, for an ancient book, the Bible is so radically different from the literature of the pagans. It gives God credit for creation, and it doesn’t confuse creation with the creator.
19. Stars
Psalm 147:4 He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name. Great is our Lord and mighty in power; his understanding has no limit.
20. Milky Way
It took mankind a long time to discover what God had always known: namely, that our Solar System was not the center of the Universe. Our Solar System is located on the fringe of a huge cluster of billions of stars known as the Milky Way Galaxy.
21. Galaxies
As recently as 1923, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the Milky Way Galaxy, with its billions of stars is not the only galaxy in the Universe. There are more galaxies out there - like remote island universes spinning in space.
22. Sombrero Galaxy
This galaxy is 30 million light years away from us and contains 100 billion stars.
23. Andromeda Galaxy
This is the Andromeda Galaxy, which contains 1000 billion stars.
24. Galaxy
Psalm 8:3 When I consider your heavens,
25. Stars
…the work of your fingers,
26. Stars
…the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
27. Earth
…what is man that you are mindful of him,
28. Stars
…the son of man that you care for him?
29. Stars
Psalm 19:1 The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.