This weekend, we were able to witness the Geminid meteor shower. What better place to view a meteor shower than in the middle of the ocean, over a hundred miles away from any sort of building or city lights? On the top deck of the ship, all of the lights are turned off during the sail, so the sky is illuminated by millions of stars.
On Saturday night, my friends and I were all hoping to view the meteor shower, but we were somewhat dissappointed by the cover of clouds that formed a fog over the stars. We decided to sleep outside, on top of the bridge, so that if the clouds went away, we would not miss the meteor shower. It was a windy night, so we had a lot of trouble getting all of our bedding laid out. One thing after another kept blowing away and we would have to go chase it down to avoid having a pillow or blanket fall into the sea. After a couple of warnings from the Captain that our scurrying around must stop in order for us to be allowed to remain on top of the bridge, we got everything settled and lay down to go to sleep. The temperature was perfect, warm with a cool breeze. We decided to use our duvet covers as extra padding underneath ourselves instead of as covers since it was not too cool outside. Around 1:30 am, I awoke to see that all of the clouds had vanished and the sky was polka dotted with stars. I immediately woke up everyone else so that we could together soak up the beauty of the sky around us. We were not able to see the meteor shower, apparently that became more visible around 3 am, but we did see some sort of incredible light that still remains unexplained. It appeared at first to be just a shooting star, but it seemed to go on forever! At first we were informed that it was probably just a satellite, but after more discussion, we discovered that it was much to fast to be a satellite. It started on one end of the sky and shot in a zig-zagging motion all the way across to the other side at lightening speed, eventually becoming invisible. Then, about five minutes later, it shot back the other direction. We are still trying to figure out what this beautiful wonder could have been.
As the night went on, the temperature dropped immensely. By about 2:30 am, we were all closely snuggled together, trying to share one blanket between the five of us, and hoping that our body heat might help us to make it through the rest of the night. Eventually, we began to warm up again and semi-comfortably finished our night outside.
Sunday night, Chelsea, Michelle, and I were invited up to the bridge to see all of the equipment used to steer the ship. The bridge is kept dark so that everyone can see ahead, with no reflections blocking their view of the sea. We were shown where the ship is steered and learned how the person steering must try and reverse the work of the currents and the wind. We also learned about all of the training necessary to work one's way up from deckhand to officer to eventually captain. One of the important steps in this training is logging over 30 hours of ship steering. For this reason, the majority of the sail is spent with the ship being steered manually instead of on auto-pilot.
After learning about all of the equipment used to steer the ship, we were shown a computer program that helps to track the stars. We saw that right at that moment, Mars was about to cross over the horizon. We raced outside to the outer rim of the bridge so that we could see it. From the bridge I saw the most incredible view I had ever beheld. Looking straight ahead, I could see the tip of the bow with the waves crashing against it. Beyond that was just an endless deep blue, the sea the same color as the sky. The only way I could differentiate where the horizen seperated sky and sea was where the shower of stars ended. The scene looked like it came from a planetarium simulation or something, it was so incredible it hardly seemed real! After nearly an hour of standing in pure awe of the scene ahead, we had to head inside and leave the bridge to get back to their work.
We decided to go up to deck 8 again in hopes of seeing the meteor shower. Emma and Bonny Jean chose to spend another night outside, but the rest of us decided to just lay out for a bit of the meteor shower then sleep comfortably in our own beds. Between 10:30 and midnight, we saw nearly a hundred shooting stars blast through the sky! We also borrowed some binoculars for a bit and were able to find the galaxy Andromeda. The whole time I remained in complete awe at this incredible picture God painted in the sky.
While we were laying out, Kaylee began singing the song "Indescribable". One line of the song says "Indescribable, uncontainable, You placed the stars in the sky and You know them by name. You are amazing, God." How incredible is it that among all of the millions of stars visible, and the billions more that cannot even be seen by the naked eye, God placed every single one in the sky individually and He knows each of them by name.
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