Blessings, blessings

**EDIT** The reason I entitled this post "Blessings, blessings," was because after coming home from the observatory last night I was just so grateful for all of the blessings God has given me one after the other this summer. Even my illness has been a blessing in a way, for it has really slowed my life down, allowing me to relax and chill and enjoy the people around me and God and His Word in ways and capacities that I have not been able to for years. And on top of all that, He's given me an awesome boyfriend who I just become closer and closer to and more and more grateful for each day, He's given me an awesome and a non-stressful and FUN research opportunity with a stipend, where I get to play around with a huge telescope. Those are just a few of the blessings God has given me this summer, I could go on and on about how He has been blessing me, but those were some of the ones that were impressing me the most when I came home last night. Now, for those of you who haven't read it yet, enjoy the rest of the post. :)



This is my beautiful observatory. Not my observatory, but I feel like it's mine because this observatory has only recently been opened this summer, I am one of a few people on campus who owns a key to it, one of a few people on campus who knows how to twist the dome and open the hatch, and one of the few people who have actually had the chance to play around with the telescope and view beautiful celestial objects through it.



The observatory construction was finished later this summer than expected, and the telescope was mounted in the observatory only a week or two ago, and so last night was actually my first night getting a hands-on experience with the observatory and telescope. Can you tell I was excited?







My professor was kind enough to take pictures of me. This is me looking through the scope. The small eyepiece on top of the huge cylindrical part of the telescope is simply an aid to help you aim the telescope at the object you are looking at, and the eyepiece I'm looking through in the picture is the one that magnifies the object you're viewing.

While my professor and I were waiting for it to get dark enough to start taking images of celestial objects, a sudden horrible attack came on...I waited as long as I could as he babbled on about all the possibilities of the things we could do that night, and while everything he was saying sounded FABULOUSLY exciting, I knew I needed to get away to take pain medication. I finally excused myself and took the three minute walk to the nearest building with water for my meds, hunching over lower and lower as I walked because of the pain. I was SO scared that I was just going to have to say goodnight to the professor and miss out on the awesome opportunity for viewing, but I prayed and prayed that the pain medication worked. And, thank the Lord, it did. After about twenty-minutes of near torture where my professor didn't seem to notice me wincing in pain while he was showing me around the equipment, I finally felt relief and felt SO SO thankful that I could continue to work with the fabulous equipment and view aspects of God's glory through the scope.

The coolest thing I saw last night was a star that we aimed the telescope at. With the naked eye it looked like a simple, shining star. But through the telescope you saw that it was instead a two-star system, or a binary star system, two stars revolving around each other. It was beautiful, awe-inspiring.



Here you can see that we've attached a CCD camera to the telescope eyepiece so that we could take images of the objects we were viewing. Unfortunately, by the time we had the telescope pointed in the right direction, the dome of the observatory stopped working, and we could no longer turn it so that the open hatch could give us a clear view of our object, which last night was going to be a beautiful globular cluster, I believe. When the dome stopped working we realized it was simply time to shut down for the night, and hopefully contact our construction people in the morning to get it working again. :( I can't WAIT for my next opportunity to view stars, planets and galaxies through the scope.