Words + Images

As a child I learned to find Orion’s Belt in the night sky.  But the star that mattered to me most was one whose name I still do not know with certainty.  It was the bright light visible above the neighbor’s house across the street.  Sometimes the speck would become lost in the canopy of the neighbor’s pear tree but inevitably at some point in some season its brightness shone.  My mother, who knew far more about the earth than about the heavens, would point it out to me.  With a smile, she always called it “Mama’s star.”  In the quiet of the night, she would stare up into that sky, at her star, letting her mind roam.  I’ve been lucky as an adult to travel the world and see the night skies from many different vantage points, and I feel lucky to live in an age when what I can’t see telescopes can capture beautifully.

By the way, these are not astronomy photographs.

While thinking about various things this morning, my eyes happened to fall upon the bowl of black sand I used for the recent shells photo shoot.  I suddenly, desperately wanted to try photographing something else against that sand, especially something red.  After deciding that using tomatoes would be bad (since I need them for dinner tonight), I searched and found some unopened tubes of glitter.  As I poured them out onto the sand, the sun made them sparkle like stars.  And thus the inspiration for this post.

Here’s NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

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