From high above...

[crfriend]

... and some nice ingenuity comes this spectacular view of the night sky -- as viewed looking down. I'm sure that artistry was not the primary driver behind the ISS, but it's nice to see that there is an appreciation of beauty that's embraced.

Back when I could still fly, some of the best things I've seen were at night -- flying around thunderstorms and watching the lightning trace upwards around the outside of the clouds -- the very subtle red exhaust glow of the turbines on a BAE-146 only a few feet away -- looking at all the lights in cities and towns, especially on approach when you can first pick up car headlights -- and seeing fireworks below you. Good stuff -- and rather underappreciated and unhearalded, too, I suspect.

The flip-side, however, is that all together too many of us live our lives unaware of the richness of the heavens; we live in an artificial world that's almost completely cut off from nature and the extraordinary beauty that she can provide. If one never sees the night sky, how can one begin to navigate at night if the electronics quit? I'll have to dig it up, but floating around here someplace is a photograph that was taken of Sapphire and I on the Continental Divide in Colorado (USA), her on one side with me on the other -- and the night sky, miles from any man-made illumination, was absolutely breathtaking. An added gem from that moment was Sapphire seeing her very first satellite transit (these were old hat to me) because she'd never really been exposed to natural darkness with the open sky above. Night-time now is something to be endured -- to be gotten through instead of savoured -- until the next dawn. It's such a shame that the only time that many of us see the sky above is when some calamity has happened that's taken our electrical lifeline -- and our light -- from us.