To view the event, I used a highly sophisticated set-up of a pair of binoculars, focusing a projection of the sun onto white paper taped to a card table. The picture below is one of the clearest we captured before rain clouds obscured the view. Venus is the black dot in the lower right area of the solar disk.
That black dot is our "sister planet". Venus is almost the same size as Earth, just 650km smaller in diameter. If we were looking at our own planet, consider that black dot holds 7 billion people, everything we know and love. Considering we all would fit on that tiny dot, our problems are reduced to insignificance.
Job 26:7 - He spreads out the northern skies over empty space; he suspends the earth over nothing.
Psalms 19:1 - The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
As I watched Venus this evening, I remembered a writing by Carl Sagan in his book Pale Blue Dot, regarding a photograph taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990, which captured Earth as a tiny blue speck in the blackness of space. Sagan wrote:
But for us, it's different. Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
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