Newly published Hubble images of distant galaxies, perhaps? Creatures discovered in the depths of Earth’s oceans? Maybe they are meteor fragments, insect brains, newfangled Lego pieces, or shells from exotic crustaceans? The correct answer is even more mind-boggling than any of these guesses.
These remarkable objects are ordinary grains of sand.
Under normal circumstances, a handful of sand looks drab and featureless, not much more pleasing to the eye than it would be to the palate. But all that changes with the right focus. Viewed at a magnification of around 250 times real life, that handful of sand is revealed to be thousands of tiny, multicolored particles of prismatic crystal, volcanic rock and spiral fragments, which time and the elements have jointly sculpted into striking formations.
Last year, for the first time, sand was photographed in a way that exposes the awesome beauty interlaced into every grain, and the images on this page are a few samples of the new photographic technique developed by University College London Prof. Gary Greenberg.
But God’s masterful artistry is hidden not only at the microscopic level. Beside these images of sand, you could place telescopic photographs of the unfathomably vast Horsehead Nebula, and both sets of pictures would embody equally breathtaking beauty, but on scales so distant from each other they could not be compared. Beauty also permeates aspects of creation far smaller than sand grains, like the winding, curvaceous symmetry of a strand of dna. It also saturates far broader vistas than that of the Horsehead Nebula, such as the stunning image that appears after we step away from the telescope, and that distant nebula becomes a small, empty space between the stars of a radiant constellation.
God is the Author of beauty, and He wove it generously into every level of His creation, from the macrocosmic to the nanoscopic. Every facet and every layer of His physical creation reveals His awesome splendor!