Whenever the weather permits, which around here is quite infrequent, I try to take advantage and get some photos of Deep Space Objects (DSO) or the planets. One of the aspects I miss from Arizona was in the three years we were there, we might have had three nights where the weather prohibited being outside. But it is what it is.

As the weather now cools, one of the bonuses of our new location is a large gas fire pit. This offers two benefits. First, it keeps me warm while the cameras gather the light from millions of light-years away, and second, it offers a view of something humans have gazed at for eons, the plasma flame, to consider things.

Thus, I can be relatively comfortable while I wait to gather the images that produce these finished pictures.

It struck me that the fuel burning to produce the flame likely derived from the remains of dinosaurs that were alive when the light from some of these stars and objects first began their journey to end up captured by my camera.

I was literally enjoying both the beginning moment and end times of this light.

This image of NGC 4631, taken over 50 minutes of 10-second exposures, shows the light from that galaxy that left around 50 million years ago during the Eocene epoch. This was when many of the predecessors of modern mammals thrived.

It was likely that I was converting the atoms of carbon and hydrogen, formed in the nuclear furnace of the first stars, that once were inside the cells of living creatures, alive when the light from this galaxy first left the system, and sending it back out into the universe as heat.

Or at least sending it out after it kept me warm.

Quite frankly, sitting under the stars renews my faith in the future. When one considers all the cataclysmic events that had to come together for the atoms within all of us to travel the immense distances they did and evolve into the beings we have all become, it would seem nature has better things in store for us than just some of the nonsense we seem to focus on daily.

We should all take a moment, on a dark, cloudless night, to look up at the stars and remember that is where we all came from and where we will all return.

Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return. Momento mori.