I didn’t get the blog updated yesterday, because we got in at midnight, and were both totally wasted!
Yesterday we had a half-day of speakers, and then were at the Creation Museum again for about 4 hours. After dinner, we went back for a special after-hours star-gazer night with Dr. Jason Lisle, who is the most intelligent guy I have ever met, but is just as nice as you could ever imagine a person to be. He graduated from his doctorate program in astrophysics summa cum laude (stratight A’s!). He had three HUGE telescopes set up, and kept moving them around to different things in the night skies. It rained earlier, but started to clear off. About 75 people signed up for this, and we all lined up at one telescope after another looking at binary stars, globular clusters, etc. Then he set two telescopes up on Jupiter. I had never seen Jupiter through a telescope before. It was magnificent, and you could see all four of the earth-visible moons lined up, two on each side. Dr. Lisle said that the closest moon on the right, Io, would actually pass in front of Jupiter a little later in the evening.
After about an hour there were only about 30 people left, and after another hour only about 10 of us. (It was a warm, humid evening, so I think the rest just got tired!) Dr. Lisle trained one of the telescopes on Uranus, and the other on Neptune, neither one of which is visible to the naked eye. Both are a gorgeous blue color. At about 15 past 11 we all looked at Jupiter. Io had disappeared, but we could see a small black circle (Io’s shadow) moving across the face of the planet. Spectacular! Dr. Lisle had one more thing for us to see: he trained the medium telescope on Jupiter again, and got Uranus at the same time. This is the only time that they will be close enough to get into the same field of view in a telescope for the next 15 years!
Today lots of additional speakers on all kinds of topics. There’s just too much to share, so I’ll have to do it in person when we get back. The upshot of the whole conference is that it’s not about the age of the earth, it’s all about the authority of Scripture. And that the Bible needs to be our source of truth in ALL areas of our lives, because it is the inspired Word of God, and anything else is only man’s fallible opinion!
Tomorrow we start for home. We will be stopping for a tour of Mammoth Caves here in Kentucky, and then heading into southeast Missouri to visit with Sharla’s sister.
Good night and God bless.