He wishes for the cloths of Heaven

There wasn’t much light pollution when I was growing up in Ireland, but it was cloudy way too often. It wasn’t until I moved to Arizona and got out into the desert at night that I fully appreciated the Milky Way as a celestial object you could look up and see. I remain appallingly “ignorant”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/07/the_joy_of_lear.html about the constellations, but via “Escadabelle”:http://escadabelle.blogspot.com/ comes a superb “photograph”:http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap040223.html of the Arizona night sky (see also a “larger version”:http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0402/skymt_payne_big.jpg).[1] If you’re ever in Tucson, make time to get out to the “Kitt Peak National Observatory”:http://www.noao.edu/kpno/ which runs a terrific “Nightly Observing Program”:http://www.noao.edu/outreach/nop/. Here in Australia the night sky is also very clear, outside the cities, but I am even more clueless about its composition.

fn1. Incidentally, I know that this photo wasn’t taken just by strolling out into the desert and pointing a camera in the air. But it conveys the feeling of what it’s like to be out there.