The Orion Cluster

Stormageddon and I headed out to the local awesome telescope to view the stars tonight. It was her idea, but both of us needed to see that the dark sky is full of tiny lights and it's never really completely dark. The astronomy guys pointed the telescope at the Orion cluster. It takes light traveling at full speed 30 years to cross the Orion cluster (makes Layton, UT seem closer, that.). When we look at it, the light we see as we look has taken 1500 years to get close enough for us to view. It must be persistent to travel so far. Light from the sun is only 8 minutes old when it gets here.

The Orion cluster--it's where stars are born. We asked how are stars born and one astronomy guy told us: The cluster is a cloud of gasses--hydrogen and something else. And there is some gravity that pulls the gasses in and compresses them more and more until they burst into flame. That's the baby star. Then it eventually gets flung out into the galaxy. That was the simple explanation. I can imagine God grabbing a handful of gasses, and compressing between his hands until it explodes into a ball of flame in his grasp, and flinging it exuberantly out into all that space. Especially exuberantly. He must shout for the sheer joy and beauty of it every single time.