The image was faint but unmistakable: the Sombrero galaxy, 30 million light years away.

How far is 30 million light years? I stepped down from the ladder that led up to the telescope viewfinder. In the darkness, I took out my phone to quickly search. Light travels 186,000 miles per second, which is 5.88 trillion miles in one year. Multiply that by 30 million, and the Sombrero Galaxy is about 176 quintillion miles away.

Quintillion. Never studied that. How do I process that? 

I couldn’t dwell on the question; my two older sons, 9 and 7 years old, were moving quickly. We were on a recent summer getaway to the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., about a two-hour drive north of Phoenix, and we still had plenty to see.

The observatory, founded in 1894 by Percival Lowell, is where Pluto was discovered in 1930 and where a researcher detected evidence of an expanding universe. Today, the observatory is a national historic landmark and a site where, as its website says, ”groundbreaking research and public curiosity intersect.”

During our visit, my curious sons and I viewed the heavens through the observatory telescopes, our visual gateway to distant wonders. We also attended a presentation at the observatory’s rooftop amphitheater, where an instructor helped the attendees identify prominent constellations and mesmerized us with the astonishing time-and-distance facts that attend discussions about space. There are likely billions of exoplanets, he said—planets outside our solar system. What are the odds, he asked, that one of those planets has conditions conducive to life?

As they bounded throughout the campus, my sons cycled through similarly imposing inquiries. What’s at the “end” of the universe? Does it go on forever? What’s the farthest we can see from Earth? To most of their questions, I could only say, “I don’t know.”

Initially, I found this a weak response. As a father, I try to assume an air of parental omniscience. But as we crisscrossed Lowell’s grounds, I realized that maybe the best thing about this trip was not in obtaining information, but in experiencing, with my sons, a shared awe. In their enthusiasm, I could sense the beginning of a philosophical, and ultimately theological, journey. But I, too, felt moved. Glimpsing ancient heavenly objects can strike like a spiritual insight. You get a sense of the grandness of things, the possibilities, the hidden power. 

Viewed through a telescope, planets and stars seem so near, and yet they are almost inconceivably far away. Astronomy and space, in other words, are marked by a sense of both immanence and transcendence—a fitting analogue for studying the God we call Father and Almighty and for the mystery of what, as Catholics, we witness on Sundays. The altar is its own kind of observatory; there, with the host before us, the incomprehensible draws near. 

And yet, for many people, the vastness of space is a source of despair—a sign, so the claim goes, of humanity’s insignificance. The facts and figures and distances often end up accentuating how little we know, as well as the smallness of Earth relative to the entirety of the cosmos. It is one thing to learn about space; it is another to try to grasp what it all means. As the psalmist writes, “When I see your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars that you set in place—What is man that you are mindful of him, and a son of man that you care for him?”

On this summer night, however, as we drove away from the observatory, I felt none of that existential weight, only gratitude at the richness of being alive. On the mountain, we had been contemplating what it means to see light that took 30 million years to reach us; and yet a couple of hours before that, my family and I were huddled over a laptop in a hotel room, eating pizza and marveling at Jalen Brunson in the closing minutes of Game 5 of the N.B.A. Finals. The distinctly human and this-world drama of athletic competition transfixed us.

Earth may be only a speck against the universal backdrop, I thought, but it has its own unique delights. Pizza, the N.B.A. finals and a break from the summer heat with my sons, daughter and wife? In all times and places, that is a winning combination.

Matt Emerson is the author of Why Faith? A Journey of Discovery (Paulist Press, 2016). His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including America and The Wall Street Journal.