From my social media post-
“Photons bounced around in this alien star for a hundred thousand years or so… then they escaped and traveled screaming at the speed of light through the cosmos… passing planets and nebula before some of them made their way into my eyepiece and into my eye, where the same photons struck my retina and were annihilated… but not before my rods and cones sent me the information for my human brain to interpret and consider.
Pretty nice Saturday night.”
So here’s the thing… I like to get all philosophical about my observing because for me, it truly is as magical a process as I am aware of in life… but others look at me and think, “NERD” or “what a weird-o”. It is lost on them. It really comes back to interests I think. What sparks a persons imagination. Sports for some, ballet for others, family for most, and astronomy for me. All with merit regardless of the negative reviews of others. We get pushed to a degree of fascination in the analysis of the activity and in the process become individual and unique. Whether it be favorable or no. And maybe that’s the miracle. To drown out the NOISE of the other things. To find a passion or a great love; purpose. I mean it all is just a combinations of atoms along the electro-magnetic spectrum managing cohesion or escaping it. Being able to focus on some small subset of data seems to be the thing that makes us special, spectacular, or even infamous. That in itself is a miracle in my book.
My point is, there is a bit of magic in everything around us. If you are like me, you spend most of the day bombarded by ads and news of extremes. It seems that’s our nature these days, extreme. I’m tired of it, so for a lot of reasons, I’m choosing to embrace process instead of outcome. And that is why I took the time to think of the above statement and then take the photo of the process. Think of it as my, “artistic expression.” I hope you find something to drown out all the noise as well.
Also, I’ve been reading, “The Internal Constitution of the Stars”. Can you tell? Ha.