Last weekend, I preached about how God is present to all creation and that we need to be mindful of his presence and make an effort to invite him into those moments and places. Here are some images of what I was talking about regarding the most distant object I have ever photographed.

In 2018, I took several images of an area of sky where "Andromeda's Parachute" is located. It was a "challenge object" for people at the Oregon Star Party. I was thrilled to have found it and captured the few pixels my equipment would allow. What appears to be a single star in a sea of stars is actually a quasar which is behind another dense object, (likely an unseen galaxy). This object is only visible due to "gravitational lensing" which warps and brightens a more distant object behind another unseen dense object, likely a galaxy in this case. If you look at images 1-4 you can imagine how tiny this to the observer. The final image gives a sense of why it is called as it is. The quasar is estimated at 10.9 billion light years away! O how great God is! his creation is beyond our comprehension, yet despite our individual size in comparison, He loves us with a perfect and unconditional love!

I captured the first three images, below. My images were taken with a Canon 80D attached to a 127 mm refractor telescope. The last (bottom-right) image was take by a 1.8 meter telescope in Hawaii. The graphic for the title comes from SkySafari 6 Pro and STScI Digitized Sky Survey. Limiting magnitudes: Constellation chart ~6.5 mag, DSS2 close-ups ~20 mag

Next time you gaze into the heavens, be aware of the vast beauty that lies above and all around us.