In Which We Play Tourist, and Mrs. Pickles Is Filled With Unaccustomed Humility

The day after Aunt Katie left us (sniff sniff) we had to assuage our grief by doing something fun, so we played tourists in DC.

When you sit in the very front of the metro train car, it looks like you're riding a roller coaster.

We went to the Air & Space Museum, along with everyone else on the eastern seaboard, it seemed. (Well, it was a Saturday in summer.) We looked at amazing photos of planets, walked through a space station prototype, and were amazed by all the dials and switches in an airplane cockpit. We bought some astronaut ice cream and a wind-up airplane for Jojo.

We also watched an IMAX 3-D movie about the Hubble Telescope, which was pretty darn awesome. The girls were way super impressed by the part about how stars are born in nebulae.

I was really looking forward to this movie. We had followed the Space Shuttle Atlantis' mission last year, as they were installing new cameras and gyroscopes and batteries to make the Hubble telescope even awesomer. Every day we would watch the videos posted on Nasa's YouTube page about the day's activities. I heard that the astronauts were also doing some filming with a 3-D camera, and that the old equipment they removed from Hubble would be put in the Smithsonian, so I kept my ears open for news. I was very excited when the IMAX movie came out.

Following the mission was eye-opening in two ways. First, I had never really thought about all the teamwork that went into a shuttle mission. I had always thought of the astronauts as the super stars who got to do all the cool stuff in space. But then I watched the videos of the ground crew as they communicated with the astronauts, trying to solve problems with the installation of some equipment on the telescope. The tension on the ground was intense -- I saw one woman dissolve in tears when the task was finally completed successfully. I then thought of the astronauts as the apex of a pyramid -- sure, they had trained for the more glamorous aspect of the mission, but they couldn't be there without the support of all the people who helped them get there, who trained them, taught them, even suited them up for launch. It was inspiring.

Secondly, the mission was literally eye-opening, not to mention mind-bending. Looking at some of the images taken by Hubble filled me with wonder at the awesomeness and beauty of our universe. I had never fully realized how immense the universe was. Then I read the story of Hubble Deep Field -- do you know it? Astronomers wanted to take the deepest picture of the universe to date, so NASA pointed Hubble at one of the darkest parts of the sky, and then took pictures for 10 days. The returned image revealed galaxies -- GALAXIES -- of stars, where before we had seen nothing. It's mind-blowing. I feel so minuscule in such a huge universe, and yet so loved -- that God should have seen fit to create all these worlds for His sheer pleasure, and then chose our planet to inhabit with us creatures made in His image. It's an honor to be a part of such a vast, beautiful universe. I really feel part of the Great Dance described in C.S. Lewis' Perelandra.