When sleep evades us and the night hours are long, it is beneficial to go outside and gaze up at the stars and out into the universe far beyond, where we will perhaps get some perspective on how small and insignificant we are on our little planet. Our eyes cannot perceive more than about 3000 stars and our brains cannot comprehend the vastness of what lies out there.
Tonight the clarity of the skies is awesome - no smoke from devastating wildfires, no wispy clouds scud between us and the stars. The air is cool and still, no twinkling of pinpricks of light reaching us from unimaginably faraway suns swirling endlessly in the arms of our spiral galaxy, the Milky Way - so called because where no man-made light pollutes the skies, the blackness of night is paled by billions of stars.
Such is their radiance that shadows are cast upon the ground and we can walk in starlight when there is no moon to light our way. It seems to me that, as the earth spins on its axis, we turn to face the centre of the Milky Way in the darkest hours so that the maximum starlight compensates for dusk and dawn, ensuring that we are never entirely in the dark. What a marvel is this universe that we know so little of and even less of our place in it.
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