Perspective, Curiosity

It's a blue sky day in central Illinois, and I did get to walk out into the yellow leaves today, and the red ones, orange, brown, and still many green, as is the grass, a joy after our summer drought. Sugar Creek has running water in it, pebbles, bubbles, and fallen leaves.

Speaking of leaves on water, here is a live link to one of the pictures Joel Gillespie gave us in the comments section of the Sweetgum Sadness post: Sweet Gum Leaves on Pond in Columbia (South Carolina). Thanks, Joel!

And here's another, showing front and back of sweetgum leaves, in Greensboro, North Carolina, the bright orange and bright yellow that abounds right now, though our own sweetgum tree is all yellow, with moments of light green.

The day is full of beauty and awe, and I walked home filled with another kind of awe and another perspective. Tasha Dunn, a scientist, was guest speaker in church, showing us various pictures of the universe from various telescopes with various techniques--pictures in the ultraviolet light spectrum, pictures where colors match certain kinds of atoms, and, in general, mosaic or collage pictures created from combining the information of multiple pictures. Plus the famous Earthrise photo from the Apollo 8 mission. Seeing an earthrise from the moon, instead of a sunrise from the earth, is an interesting perspective.

And seeing the earth as a dot on a sunbeam, as Carl Sagan said, is also awesome! Thanks, Tasha!

Coming around the corner into my own neighborhood, I saw the Mars rover Curiosity sitting on the curb, waiting for the garbageman. Surely not! Surely this was something else, perhaps one of those machines for rolling up a garden hose. Or the backstop of a dismantled driveway basketball hoop. Or the two things side by side seen from an odd perspective.

Anyhoo, it made my day!!