Reminds me.
Couple months ago, the guy who co-owns a company locally that takes care of our shop rags and mats came by and we chatted a little. He lived in town (same town as Daren Todd) for his entire life, all 42 years of it, until recently. He had been building a place out at their family farm about 30 minutes from town. Anyway he got his place built and moved in, he stopped in while bringing us our 200 rags and 4 floor mats, and was telling me about staying in the new place. Said the first thing he did was walk out on the back porch at night in his underwear and take a leak off the porch, and while doing so, looked up and said he seen something he's never seen before. The big dipper. Said he's never seen so many stars. Now I grew up in the city too (much larger city) and I had seen it when I was a kid, then again about 5 years ago when I moved out of town. Now every night if it's clear, I make sure to go out & have a look even just for a minute or two...out where I'm at, I can just barely see the milky way. Just barely. I'm not far enough from town unfortunately. Tonight is cold, clear and everything's nice & bright. Good night for gazing, but still way too much light pollution from the school-and the towns closeby.
GF owns a rental property over near Allison, and occasionally has a gap between renters-and we enjoy going out there for a few days when there aren't too many tractors that need to be worked on. There are places out there that man hasn't set foot on in hundreds of years; albeit for good reason (close to impossible to access). BUT THOSE are the nice places to be for gazing the night skies. You can watch satellites, meteors, all kinds of things. Watching stuff fly around in those dark skies makes you wonder....are we really alone? I think we are, but it does make one think.
