I got up a little early this morning, around 2. Out with the dogs before 2:30, out into a gorgeous dark night sky. My old friend Orion was high and clear in the east, the Pleiades almost straight overhead, and a very bright Jupiter a bit to the southwest of it. So many stars were visible that some constellations were hard to pick out of the clutter. Just beautiful...
The dogs, of course, completely ignored all the beauty. Racer was all about the pine cones, as usual. The three brown dogs got all focused on one square inch of dirt, down near our gate. I let them stay as long as they wanted to, and for about two minutes they were continuously deeply inhaling whatever scent it was that was fascinating them. Their tails were going a mile a minute, and their body language said “We're delighted with something!” Sure wish they could tell me what it was...
On the walk back up our driveway and back into the house, I got to noticing the artificial lights around our property. There are quite a few of them, more than I'd have expected. Before leaving the house, I turned off all the interior lights – at least, I turned off the things we normally think of as lights. But outside I saw our solar-powered gazebo lights (white LEDs that are quite bright) and a teensy little orange LED high on a mast anchored to the west end of our house. This was a power light on the radio tranceiver that connects our little place to the Internet, via a repeater on the hill high above me. Then through our home's windows, I could see a myriad of little lights, every one of them an LED. There were chargers, switch illuminators, front panels of audio/video gear, our wine cork remover, and on and on. I counted 25 such lights before I gave it up.
What do you suppose someone from, say, the 1700s would have made of all these lights?
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