I'm posting more and more on Facebook now. My sisters have been on it for months and they insisted I join. So I did. And it's really nice to have all manner of family and friends keep in touch. It's nice. I think I already said it was nice.

So if I don't post on here a lot, it's because I'm killing time with semi-regular updates on Facebook.

I just came in from outside with my telescope. The light pollution's too much to see things pointed north right now. The baseball field at the bottom of the hill has a huge spotlight shining right up the hill... I don't know what the purpose of the light is: there won't be any games played there for six months, there's not much foot traffic down there when it's dark, and it's strange that they have that much light leakage all the way up the hill. And cars come up the hill on a regular basis, which is understandable because it's a Saturday night. So I settled for looking at the Pleiades. With the naked eye, it looks like a smudge in the sky, but with a telescope you get to see hundreds of stars.

There's something very relaxing about standing in the dark and watching the stars. The light takes years to reach us, so in effect we're seeing them as they were, not as they are now. Of all the directions the light from those stars could have travelled, we get to see the photons that just happened to have been sent in our direction, and they arrived here when it was dark enough for us to see them. A chance in a billion, but it happens every night.

Listen: Out There In The Universe - Spacetribe ... Castles In The Sky - Ian Van Dahl featuring Marsha.