New Moon Darkness Tonight

I arrived at Furnace Creek just before 5am this morning after an all-night, deep-sky imaging session in Badwater Basin and a quick photo stop at Zabriskie Point.

When I woke at 10:30am I was unable to sleep further due to my excitement for the May 11th new moon and the fact that I repaired the telescope problems! The new moon means no moon at all and very dark skies. This is the best night of the monthly lunar calendar to do dark sky capture and I'm getting a jump on things. I made coffee with oatmeal and then cooked up some vegetarian meals for the refrigerator and started to plan when suddenly I had a lightbulb go off.

You are the Stars of Rainbow in the Stars or as Carl Sagen famously said, "we're made of star stuff". I was quick to put on some Satsang music Remember Jah. Those who know me well know that I spent 7 years in Jamaica, West Indies and that I also began practicing Kundalini yoga in 2019. This song mashes up Reggae with Kundalini, there really is something for everyone. The verse in my head making the lightbulb go off, “Made out of love, that’s what you are, made out of love and you come from the stars” or the CSN lyric from Woodstock also captures it, “We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden”.

The metaphoric hope of Rainbow in the Stars is interpreted as the hope we have in each other. Our innate capacity to connect and work through our differences, share our failures and celebrate our victories, I have a Badwater post in draft I'll complete while imaging at the Basin tonight.