Still in Fort Davis, Texas. We returned to the McDonald Observatory and this time our focus was stars and the sun. We learned that our sun isn’t all that big, only about half as big as some of our planets and not even at the center of our galaxy (the Milky Way) but still… millions of miles away from us, and billions of miles from other “stars†and it will be over 5 billion years before our sun dies. So… then we visited the telescopes. First the original one built in 1939, and then the last one built to observe the spectrography of the stars. Telescopes measure light and break it into spectrums. They can tell us what the distant object is made of and what stage it is in (brand new, growing, mature, falling apart, etc), measuring distances, and how stars develop and dance with each other… etc. The last telescope (over 40 years old) is still state of the art, and sees 7 times further than the one built in approx 1939. The next one to come on line within a year in Chile has a mirrored surface measuring area 7x larger than that. So I wrinkled up my brain and tried to formulate a question… so if the second one sees 7x further than the first one, the new one coming on line will see 7x further than that and we’re talking billions of miles each leap, how many billions of miles (light years) will we be able to "see"? and… What are we trying to see or find? I could only think of a poem called “First Flight†written by a 19 year old American Spitfire test pilot named John Gillespie McGee, Jr. who joined the RAF before the US got into WWII. He died in an air crash 3 months after the Spitfire test flight, but he left behind this poem for us… He flew the highest we had been – 30,000 feet and he thought there is the face of God. Please google the poem and read it. And then go outside and look up! God bless you!