Rainwater Observatory

On a recent trip to rural Mississippi to see some friends of ours who had just had their second kid, my wife and I stumbled upon something pretty odd for a small town in Mississippi. Near the town of French Camp, just off the Natchez Trace Parkway, there's a world-class observatory run by a local private Christian academy dedicated to helping underprivileged kids get a leg up on life.

Now here's where my graduate courses in orbital mechanics came in pretty handy. After a brief discussion of the pros and cons of positioning NASA's next space telescope at the Lagrangian point on the other side of the Moon, the observatory's director, Mr. James Hill, was hooked. He knew that I'd soak up every word he said about his fine observatory, and that's exactly what I did.

Rainwater Observatory is primarily an educational as well as partly research observatory. We have about two hundred groups a year that come through, and what we like to do is to show people the wonders of the heavens. So many people now can't see the Milky Way; we like to share that with people. We're located right on the Natchez Trace Parkway at one of the six dark areas of the eastern United States.

We have about 14,000 sand, including the largest array of telescopes in the southeastern United States. Rainwater Observatory is home to a very impressive 0.65-meter robotic research telescope. It's part of the Lost Comras Observatory global telescope network, which is a private operating foundation building a global network of telescopes for scientific research and research-based education.

We live in a universe that is incredible. We're such a tiny part of something far greater than any of us can even begin to comprehend. Our Milky Way galaxy here is a hundred thousand light-years across, with one light-year equivalent to almost six trillion miles. It's composed of about 200 billion stars; our Sun is one star in one galaxy. Astronomers have discovered billions of other galaxies.

It's really an amazing thing when you look at the stars at night. They're not just points of light; they're places, physical places. They're places that are views of things that we can't even begin to comprehend on the earth, and it's really a remarkable thing. There are some beautiful passages in Job and Isaiah that talk about this.

In the Psalms, it said: "When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars you've set in place, what's man that you're even mindful of him?" It's really a powerful statement, and it was written thousands of years ago. In Job, we read: "Indeed, these are the mere edges of His ways, and only a whisper we hear of Him, but the thunder of His power, who can understand?"

But it's such a remarkable thing, too, to study the heavens and to help people to see and realize that we're just a small part of something far greater than any of us can even begin to comprehend.