About ten of the clock last night our neighbor called and invited us to look at the night sky with him through his small telescope. He brought it over and set it up on our driveway and we joked about shooting the streetlight on the corner so to better see the stars. Only half-joked because he said he did, once, shoot it out, and S offered to go get the air rifle. Laziness prevailed, however, and we talked astronomy and astrology and suns and stars and Mars, which hung between two big fir trees in the east, like some big garden orb weaver when you can't see the web you just see the golden and red spider.

We could see the polar ice cap.
I wanted to see Mars' moons, Phobos and Danos, but I guess they're too small to see even with a powerful telescope.

We looked at the craters on the moon and talked about how the earth is the only (known) supporter of life, because life generates the atmosphere, and about how our sun is actually expanding and is hotter than it was 2000 years ago, and about Antares, hanging low in the sky, opposite Mars. Antares is the other red shiny thing up there, and through the telescope it looked like it fluxed between electric blue and fire-engine red. It's bigger than our sun. Big and very very far away.

He showed us a dead star, which looked just like someone had taken a smudge stick and rubbed it in a circle on the sky, and we looked at the North Star and Andromeda, Pegasus, the Dragon, and numerous other constellations, talked navigation and astrological importance and about Mercury's retrograde.

I fell into bed and dreamt of big white winged horses.