The Big Picture

The Boston Globe's Big Picture is one of my favorite sites. Their photo blogs capture the best and worst of the world - wars and unrest, love and celebrations.

Usually I'm in awe of what it captures - beauty and brevity and pain and hope. At least once a week the pictures make me smile and/or tear up.

Today they made me tear up with a tribute to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

It's heartbreaking to remember how excited everyone was for Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher in space, and how we sat in our classroom to watch the launch. Our class didn't really know anything had gone wrong. We'd never seen a space shuttle launch before, so watching it explode and break apart in the sky didn't have the immediate impact on us that it had on our teacher.

When I lived in Northern Virginia I once spent about three hours walking all around Arlington National looking for the Challenger Memorial.

A friend of mine insisted on seeing it. Everything is BIG in Washington. So we expected to easily find and come upon this grand scale tribute. It's the opposite. The Challenger Memorial is small, just a plaque really with all of the astronauts' faces engraved into it.

But it's a cemetery, so probably a wise choice to not to erect some giant rocket memorial in the middle of all that hallowed ground.

If you're hanging out on your slick iPad right now and you want to check out some more photos from the Big Picture here are a few. Remind yourself:

How small you are

What wonder there is beyond what we can see

That nature is unforgiving

That war is brutal

That bobsleds can unite

That love is essential