How It Started (Peak Perseid Night 2021)
The Milky Way reflected in a vernal pool in Nevada.
Actual Milky Way reflection photo (not a faked composite image).
As the world embraced the concept of social distancing, millions discovered the joys of the great outdoors. Here in the Great Basin, camping offers the opportunity to see a natural dark night sky in its full glory.
On this night in mid-August, at close to midnight the Milky Way was arching straight overhead, so it struck the horizon vertically at a 90 degree angle. The bright galactic center was perched high above the southwest horizon. We were camped on a dry lakebed to have a panoramic view of the night sky, to watch the Perseid meteor shower.
Nearby was a vernal pool, inhabited by tadpole shrimp, prehistoric-looking 3-inch crustaceans that resemble horseshoe crabs, which date back 300 million years. Although tadpole shrimp species go back 400 million years, individuals can reproduce within a week of these pools forming, then the pool may dry up days later, encasing their eggs in dried mud until the next rain big enough to reform the pool, which may not happen again for many years.
Reflected in this pool, the oldest light we can see with the naked eye is from the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.5 million light years away. The Hubble Space Telescope has picked up light as old as 13.2 billion years. The new James Webb Space Telescope will see even farther back in time, closer to the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.
Sitting my a pool harboring ancient crustaceans, lit only by ancient light, the calcium in our bones and the calcium in the shrimp coming from ancient supernovae, it is easy to comprehend John Muir's observation, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."
The story of our 3-night pursuit of the 2021 Perseid meteor shower:
www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/2021/08/15/perseid-m...
How It Started (Peak Perseid Night 2021)
The Milky Way reflected in a vernal pool in Nevada.
Actual Milky Way reflection photo (not a faked composite image).
As the world embraced the concept of social distancing, millions discovered the joys of the great outdoors. Here in the Great Basin, camping offers the opportunity to see a natural dark night sky in its full glory.
On this night in mid-August, at close to midnight the Milky Way was arching straight overhead, so it struck the horizon vertically at a 90 degree angle. The bright galactic center was perched high above the southwest horizon. We were camped on a dry lakebed to have a panoramic view of the night sky, to watch the Perseid meteor shower.
Nearby was a vernal pool, inhabited by tadpole shrimp, prehistoric-looking 3-inch crustaceans that resemble horseshoe crabs, which date back 300 million years. Although tadpole shrimp species go back 400 million years, individuals can reproduce within a week of these pools forming, then the pool may dry up days later, encasing their eggs in dried mud until the next rain big enough to reform the pool, which may not happen again for many years.
Reflected in this pool, the oldest light we can see with the naked eye is from the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.5 million light years away. The Hubble Space Telescope has picked up light as old as 13.2 billion years. The new James Webb Space Telescope will see even farther back in time, closer to the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.
Sitting my a pool harboring ancient crustaceans, lit only by ancient light, the calcium in our bones and the calcium in the shrimp coming from ancient supernovae, it is easy to comprehend John Muir's observation, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."
The story of our 3-night pursuit of the 2021 Perseid meteor shower:
www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/2021/08/15/perseid-m...