I took Pepper out for her evening break last night and looked up to see an amazing show of stars. I hadn’t realized that the moon wasn’t rising until 2:30 am, and the sky was therefore pitch black. I grabbed my shortest focal length lens, tripod and shutter cable, then headed out to the front deck to see what I could find. Cassiopeia was in beautiful radiance, the Milky Way was streaking directly over the house, and I was in a celestial heaven.

“And we who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos we’ve begun, at last, to wonder about our origins. Star stuff, contemplating the stars organized collections of 10 billion-billion-billion atoms contemplating the evolution of matter tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth and perhaps, throughout the cosmos.” — Carl Sagan