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Posted:

23rd June, 2008


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The more you learn, the less you know

On our home bookshelf we have a number of books on astronomy. I have visited planetariums in both the northern and southern hemispheres over my lifetime. I was stunned by the meteorite shower I got up at 2 a.m. to watch in 2001 and then by a magnificent comet in 2006. But nothing has stirred my enthusiasm quite as much as the interview I heard recently with backyard stargazer, Trevor Barry. His glee was positively contagious!

Trevor Barry is an ex-miner from Broken Hill, Australia, who is an amateur astronomer - but not just any amateur. He is one of four around the world currently contributing to the Cassini-Huygen program with NASA. When he was interviewed on the radio, both his humility and his awe rang through as he said, "I will not live long enough to look at everything or delve into everything that I would like to in astronomy. The more you find out about astronomy the more you realize the less you know."

Yet he obviously knows a great deal. So obsessed with his interest in astronomy that he put himself through university and graduated with top honors in astronomy. Trevor Barry has spent 25 years stargazing and many years imaging Saturn on his home telescope. Because of his familiarity with Saturn, one night's imaging of the planet in February stood out because of "a white spot that should not have been there". That white spot turned out to be a raging electrical storm. The Cassini imaging team had discovered this storm only last December, unbeknownst to Trevor. And according to Dr Georg Fischer from the University of Iowa, a partner in the Cassini imaging mission working with NASA,

Four years ago it was not known how often these storms occurred and it was not known they were related to lightning activity. We saw similar storms in 2004

and 2006 that each lasted for nearly a month, but this storm is longer-lived by far. And it appeared after nearly two years during which we did not detect any electrical storm activity from Saturn.

Although the storm activity is barely noticeable to the untrained eye, it wouldn't be hard to miss up close. The storm, in the southern hemisphere of Saturn is around several thousand kilometers in diameter and has lightening bolts up to 10,000 times more powerful than the lightening we have on Earth. Amazing!

To me this is all a big deal. Yet it is only a smidgeon of what has been discovered recently about Saturn. And Saturn is only one of eight planets in our solar system. (Astronomers used to speak of nine planets, but Pluto has now been demoted.) And our solar system is but a tiny portion of our universe.

I now know marginally more about our solar system than I knew yesterday, but I know appallingly little; I understand almost nothing. However, that is not to say that I cannot look up into the Milky Way on a clear night, or look through someone else's telescope at Saturn, or view a comet in the sky, and marvel - and that marvel can spur me not only to seek to know and appreciate a whole lot more than I presently do but especially to look to the Great God who designed and understands it all perfectly.

As David wrote:

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 (Ps. 19:1-4).

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