As you can tell from the sudden change in the content of my most recent posts, we are now off-island.
Oh, you saw that, eh?
Yeah, I love the term “off-island”. The locals use that term to note their status when they go, well, off the island. Since I’ve spent 24 days on Kauai in the last 12 calendar months, I’m almost a local, so permit me the latitude. But alas, I digress.
Tonight is the first night that I bothered to look up at the stars since I’ve returned — and how pathetic the view is. We were so struck (aren’t we clever?) by the vivid view of the stars while on Kauai. Words just cannot describe it. We looked up for minutes at a time.
In fact, shooting stars outnumbered rainbows in the rainbow state 3-2 while we were there. And I would have to say that we had far more opportunity to observe the daytime sky for rainbows.
Unfortunately, Dallas has so much light pollution that even seeing a few stars is near impossible. So I am really missing that by-product of being in Kauai. If you can recall the simulated view presented in any good planetarium, that’s Kauai at night.
Yeah, it’s always “striking” when you get out somewhere really dark. I recall many times saying to myself when in the countryside, “oh yeah, there *is* still a Milky Way”. All I can see in our back yard in Denver is the very brightest stars, and the planets.
Yeah, and in fact, we discussed the Milky Way. As in, is that cloudy portion what they call the Milky Way?
It’d been so long since either of us had seen it that we were wondering.
Indeed, that’s the Milky Way. What you are looking at, in case you’ve forgotten, is our own galaxy, edge-on (our galaxy is a spiral one, i believe), which we look through to see other stars and galaxies. Kind of like if you were on Saturn, looking through the rings to space beyond.