Spirit of Islam, Sept-Oct 2025

Astronomers in California spent a decade designing a revolutionary 10-metre telescope with four times the “seeing power” of any existing telescope on Earth. To make the project a reality, they needed 70 million dollars, provided by the W.M. Keck Foundation of Los Angeles. The observatory was named in its honour. Completed in 1993 and installed on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, the Keck Observatory was then the largest astronomical telescope in the world. Designed by astronomers at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley, it was so powerful that Howard B. Keck predicted: “It will permit one to see the light of a single candle from the distance of the moon.” The Keck Telescope allowed astronomers to observe objects 12 billion light-years away, study the nature of quasars, and explore how galaxies and stars are formed. Marvin L. Goldberger, President of Caltech, remarked: “It should provide answers to the universe’s most challenging and basic questions.” (Newsweek, January 14, 1985) God has created an incredibly vast universe and given humanity the knowledge to behold its immensity — so that people may see the universe in all its grandeur and be awed by the greatness of the One who created it; so they might witness events millions of miles away and thousands of years in the past, and be moved to exclaim: “Lord, You have given light to the world—how infinitely more radiant You must be! Lord, You have given man sight— how infinitely more penetrating Your vision must be!” MAN IN GOD’S WORLD Wonder Awakens Belief God has created an incredibly vast universe and given humanity the knowledge to behold its immensity — so that people may see the universe in all its grandeur and be awed by the greatness of the One who created it.