Stars along with the sun, the moon and all the other miracles of the cosmos and the universe considered individually or in their natural groups stun this observer and make of him a worshiper of God.  Admittedly I have been an observer of stars for most of my life.  When I was a very small child my friends and brother and I camped at lake haunts a hiking or biking distance from our homes in southwest Minneapolis.  Wood ticks be damned we laid in the grass, we slept there in our bed rolls, and we watched the stars.  The Milky Way was our glowing night-light and from it certain individual stars seemed to push through the rest to pierce the dark night as special harbingers some import we thought and we talked about the individual stars among ourselves.  

And of course there were groups of stars.  All the ones you know like the Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Orion (including what we always called "Beetle Juice") and others. Constellations are groups of stars that form shapes in the sky. People hundreds (even thousands) of years ago saw these constellations and named them. Most of the constellations in the Northern Hemisphere were named by people in Egypt and Mesopotamia, but some, and the most commonly known, were named by ancient Greeks and Romans. There are 88 constellations that have been officially recognized by the international astronomical union. Some people use constellations as a natural sky map, like the two stars in the big dipper that point to the north star which tells you which direction you're going. And then there were shooting stars, not stars of course but meteorites, still miracles to us as we laid on the ground and took in the big show.

I know now that I never did grow up where stars are concerned.  Still, a half century later I barely can get my fill of stars and some individual stars still push others aside and pierce the darkness as harbingers of something more to learn.  I invite you to study a very special star that I happened upon just a couple of years ago.

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