Salt Lake Temple

beauty

I am currently in an astronomy class and one of our assignments was to go to the Salt Lake Temple to look at the stars, suns, moons and other astronomical symbols on the temple. You wouldn't believe what we learned! It was awesome! There are 104 stars, 50 moons, 52 suns, 34 Earths, 184 Saturns (yes, Saturn!) 2 clouds and one big dipper! Crazy I know! It was and is amazing. And every single one of them is symbolic for something, including saturn. Although the meaning of saturn is unknown, it must mean something to have 184 of them on the temple!

These are what we guess to be the Saturn Stones. We talked for a while with the missionaries on Temple Square about them and they shared with us their binder filled with information about the symbols on the temple. All that we know is that there are 184 Saturns. So we concluded ourselves that these must be Saturn because they are so frequent on the temple and no one knows what they are. 1+1=Saturn.

Obviously, the Sun Stone.

The Star Stone. Some are right side up and some are pointing down. The ones right side up represent our prayers pointing to heaven and the ones pointing down represent the answers we receive to our prayers coming down from heaven.

The Moon Stone. These were interesting because they are shown on the temple in the stages of the moon. Here we see the moon in one of its stages (new moon, full moon, waning etc.) The Moons are also symbolic of October and April (Conference people!)

After the examination of the temple, we went over the the visitors center for a little while. Preston had never been to see the Christus statue, so that was really nice. There was also this miniature replica of Jerusalem to show geographically where certain important and interesting events from the Saviors life took place. It was really interesting and made us really want to visit the Holy Land someday. Overall it was a very good day and we highly recommend visiting if you haven't already and visiting if you have!