This is the second poster in the Come Thou Fount poster series. It is taken from the first few lines of the hymn. They are as follows:
Come, Thou Fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.
At first I thought about using a photo of old faithful to represent the fount of every blessing but after looking at countless photos of the geyser the mystery wore off and it didn’t seem impressive enough to represent what the lyrics in the song are trying to emote. At the same time I was watching an episode of Nova about the use of telescopes. Yes, I am that dull. But they began showing these beautiful photos of the farthest reaches of space. I had to keep telling myself that these are not paintings. I’ve seen them before but in that moment I realized these represent what that song is talking about way more than hot water in Yellowstone.
I got the photo from Hubblesite.org. The photo is entitled, “Embryonic Stars Emerge from Interstellar Eggs.” What really impacted me was the size of these columns of gas. I would try to relate in my own words how big they are and what they are but I would butcher it. So here is the description from hubblesite.org:
The pillars are in some ways akin to buttes in the desert, where basalt and other dense rock have protected a region from erosion, while the surrounding landscape has been worn away over millennia. In this celestial case, it is especially dense clouds of molecular hydrogen gas (two atoms of hydrogen in each molecule) and dust that have survived longer than their surroundings in the face of a flood of ultraviolet light from hot, massive newborn stars (off the top edge of the picture). This process is called “photoevaporation. “This ultraviolet light is also responsible for illuminating the convoluted surfaces of the columns and the ghostly streamers of gas boiling away from their surfaces, producing the dramatic visual effects that highlight the three-dimensional nature of the clouds. The tallest pillar (left) is about about 4 light-years long from base to tip.
I decided to use the heights of old faithful (108 feet) instead of miles because I wanted to show the comparison from one of the worlds largest geysers to something so unfathomably large. One light year is 237,000,000 times longer than the circumference of the world and that column is 4 light years long! Our world would be invisible to the eye next to one of those. That to me is a better representation of the size of the fount of every blessing sung about in Robert Robinson’s hymn.
