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bipolarber -> RE: Breathtaking (9/24/2008 8:28:04 AM)
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One late September, I was camping up in Leadville Colorado... the skies were perfectly clear, and there was absolutely no light pollution from the city. There, lying on our bedrolls, staring up at the sky, we could trace the Milky Way's "backbone" all the way across the sky. By about 3 in the morning (which was about the time we finally settled down after drinking and fucking and a few had been lighting up, we thought we saw the first start of dawn off in the East. "That can't be right... it's only three... how can we be seeing dawn near the horizion already?" we thought. About ten minutes later, the fuzzy light "blob" on the horizion was a bit more defined... and we all realized...
It was the galactic core.
Suddenly, several of us, getting that sudden rush of perspective, that we were looking back across hundreds of light years, across the arc of the Western Spiral Arm, toward a cloud of stars that makes up the center of our galaxy, had to sit down, close our eyes, and concentrate on our hands or something, to counteract the feeling of vertigo. (or, maybe it was the wine coolers...) We felt like ants, looking across and down a road, seeing a sparkling city miles and miles away... except the scale was far greater than even that....
The only thing that compared to it, was when I was invited to be the "birth partner" for a friend of mine, who had twins. Being an ex-farm kid, I thought her giving birth would be no big deal, but I was proven delightfully wrong. It was definitely one of thos "sense of wonder" moments. [:)]
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