Merry Christmas Have Fun with These Pictures!

If you love space, stars, and the sky like I do, you must visit NASA's picture of the day site!

Holy Cow! When I found this site I must have spent hours looking at all the breathtaking photos. The NASA site has hundreds of archived pics taken from cameras, satellites, and telescopes. Some pictures are original, some are time lapsed, some look doctored...but who cares they're beautiful! Each picture comes with a description of what you're looking at which helped me out a lot.

Merry Christmas and enjoy!

Going to the Country for Meteors

Saturday, I took a trip to my uncle's house in Grant Park, IL., so that I can view the meteors on their greatest viewing days, August 11 & 12. Because I live 20 minutes from Chicago, the sky is lightened by all the city lights, making the stars pretty dim. Grant Park is in the middle of nowhere. Nice farm land and dark skies. I first went out at 9pm and spotted a really fast meteor out of the corner of my eye. Wow wee! After about 10 minutes, another. Yeah boy! I kept hearing on the news that the best time to view is after 3am. 3am! OK, I'm doing it. I set my alarm, and quickly got out of bed when it went off. I was so excited. I stepped outside and what's this??? 70% cloud cover, and quickly more clouds coming! OH NO. Luckily, I viewed two more meteors before 3:23am when the clouds took over. By 4am we had a thunderstorm with high winds, I didn't want to think the "T" word (tornado), but I was thinking the T word on a count that I was literally in the middle of nowhere! Thank God none of the sort happened.

August is for the month for meteors and also the month of "The Tears of St. Lawrence." St. Lawrence (Laurentius) was a Christian deacon who was martyred by the Romans in 258AD. He was burned alive and the meteors have become known as St. Lawrence's fiery tears.
Interested, I decided to look up what it says in the bible about stars. I found 2 references about God and His stars:

"He counts the number of the stars; He calls them all by name." Ps 147:4

"...He calls them all by name.... Not one is missing." Is 40:26

All are named. All. I could not have counted them all if I tried. Then I remembered another counting verse. Jesus was trying to explain how much God loved us when he said, "But the very hairs of your head are all numbered." Matt 10:30. We are very fortunate and sometimes in the rush of things, forget.
I couldn't take a picture of the meteors, so I painted this watercolor called, "St. Lawrence Tear."
More country pictures tomorrow.