You ever go walkabout and find your mind wandering to far off and imaginary places as you’re driving along early in the morning before the sunrise?
As I’m driving along the motorway toward Clayton to collect Katie and Alex for school, I noticed that Venus was exceptionally bright as usual but the hellish planet named for the goddess of beauty had a couple of friends nearby.
The red colour of her nearest neighbour was unmistakably Mars and I was pretty sure that the other one was Saturn or Jupiter (later, I’d discover that the companion was indeed Saturn as Jupiter was lurking right about at the horizon and out of sight).
Seeing Venus and the odd planet at this time of the morning isn’t particularly unusual but as I’ve always had quite a fascination with astronomy and astrophysics, I’ve always enjoyed looking toward the stars and imagining what it’d be like to see them up close and personal.
But what really struck me hard this particular morning was just thinking about all of the things that went into what I was seeing in the skies above me.
Think about it for a minute.
Scientists estimate that the age of the universe is about 13.8 billion years and the solar system is about 4.6 billion years old.
The age of the various planets in our solar system are about 4.5 billion years.
That’s such an unimaginably long time to be in existence. I don’t know how one could truly put that timeline into a context that you could really understand
And in all of that time, all those eons upon eons and billions of years came together for a few minutes for me to just enjoy the wonder of the beauty of our solar system and three of our neighbouring planets.
It was a view that took an unimaginably long time to create.
It is a view that will never be seen again in exactly that way.
Ever.
I only had a couple of minutes to truly appreciate this glorious conjunction of time and planets before the brightness of the sunrise was enough to obscure even Venus from view.
But in that small window of time, it felt wonderful that such an infinitesimally insignificant person like me just happened to come along at exactly that perfect time to appreciate this example of the majesty and beauty of our universe.
That kind of perspective doesn’t come along very often so treasure it when it does! 🙂