Space Shuttle Against the Sun: Despite Interruptions the Age of Miracles and Wonders Continues

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust?" -- Hamlet

With all the squabbles and bickering that make up our present perverted polity, it's easy to miss the real achievements of the nation. The image above of the shuttle against the sun is today's emblem of real achievement.

Although chained to my day and age, I still maintain that in a thousand years the main moment remembered that occurred in my lifetime will be everything that led up to and away from this moment:

Footprint on the Moon On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong put his left foot on the rocky Moon. It was the first human footprint on the Moon.

Today's images will be lost in the sands of time, but will, for now, stand in as a reminder of what extraordinary and exceptional beings we are. As someone once said, "We are all lying in the mud, but some of us are looking at the stars."

One of those stargazers is the photographer, Thierry Legault **, an engineer famed for his pictures of space taken in his yard in Paris who took these images in Florida, 60 miles south of the Kennedy Space Centre.

Not widely published today are other shots Legault took, such as these in which both the shuttle and the Hubble space telescope can be seen just before the rendezvous in which a ship from the Earth took the greatest scientific instrument in history into its cargo bay for "repairs."

(Detail)

And so, while the petty politicians bleat, and the small and not so small wars rage on in fits and starts, almost everyone on the Earth will sleep tonight with someone they don't really mind all that much. And tomorrow the kids in the playground across the street will run and skip and jump at recess. And tomorrow our planet, one of many like it or perhaps alone in the universe, will turn full of much more goodness and grace than hate and suffering.

And tomorrow, somewhere in mid-heaven, floating weightless between the Earth and the Sun, men and women will carefully repair and refurbish a telescope so that we might see ever deeper into the whole of creation, and perhaps even, just a bit, into the mind and purposes of God.

These are the days of miracle and wonder,
This is the long distance call,
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all o-yeah,
The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky,
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby don't cry
Don't cry don't cry

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** Other high definition shots by Thierry Legault of Transit of Atlantis and Hubble in front of the Sun.

Posted by Vanderleun at May 15, 2009 3:56 PM