Observing the full moon with a small telescope and binoculars and nice warm eyes after an arduous day of hiking and scrambling on the magnificent sandstone formations at Piedra Blanca, surrounded by high chaparral and the ridges of Haddock and Thorn Point to the north with the moonrise here at Piedra Blanca, from the recent geological time of the sandstone to the pits and scars of deep time on our nearest neighbor, the history of our solar system is staring us in the face. As the stunning globe rises it illuminates the Sespe Wilderness with a special light far away from the artificial light pollution of the auto malls and sports fields, of the schools that look more like insecticide factories rather than the centers of education. Without the Moon it would be hard to imagine the Earth would be habitable for humans, we are lucky but take our unique planet for granted extracting far more resources than the world can handle with a lust for unending progress. As we observe we see the ejecta blankets from the impact crater Tycho to the dark beauty of Oceanus Procellarum, there is much beauty to absorb. Under different phase illumination there is a lifetime of features to observe, the Triesnecker Rilles, the craterlets on the floor of Clavius and unlike viewing the Milky Way on a dark moonless night the Moon feels vastly more relatable than the vaster reaches outside our solar system. Beyond our solar system we are finding lots of planets orbiting other stars but so far none are like Earth, perhaps in time we may find something similar. Our solar system resides in the outer burbs of our galaxy, not quite country folk but close, in a subarm - the Orion Spur - inside a major arm - the Perseus Arm - so let's not get too excited about our importance in the scheme of things cosmic. The next nearest galaxy to the Milky Way is the Andromeda Galaxy much larger than ours and 2.5 million light years away and the next one out M33 the great face-on spiral in Triangulum is 2.7 million light years out and on and on. And our Sun will expand in a few billion years and engulf the inner solar system including Earth. Back here at Piedra Blanca we look beyond the formations as we picnic and observe the moon through a small telescope with stacked filters to dull the intense light as we feel a part of the whole thing but also a melancholy as we take into account the damage we have wrought to our world in a very short amount of time and we are not slowing down. Our tiny planet is indeed as Carl Sagan put it a pale blue dot, a pale blue dot, a pale blue dot, a pale blue dot. 
R.C '21