(Caption is for this and previous photo) We can imagine a coincidence thousands of years ago, the blink of an eye on cosmic time scales... In the Oort Cloud, an insignificant ball of dust and ice, its path disturbed once again, its orbit honed by the gravity of those far above its station, hurled toward the Sun, uncertain of its future... On Earth, in an in- hospitable corner of the White Mountains of California, a seedling bursting forth, a mere twig of the species pinus longaeva, equally uncertain of its destiny... While one traverses the timeless emptiness of space and withstands the incessant pull of the Jovian planets, the other grows, is carved by the bitter winds into fantastical shapes, spreads its arms toward the heavens, and dies a glorious death, its own body the sarcophagus that will carry it unchanged millennia into the future... Perihelion, for a comet, is as dangerous an affair as the flight of the mindless moth toward the open flame, or the close encounter on a dance floor with a woman so beautiful and so out of reach that every trace of sensation, of admiration, and of love is scorched away in an instant... But, once in a while, a sungrazing comet survives its close encounter and fills the skies of planet Earth with its brilliant light, flaunting its twin gowns of effervescence blown asunder by sunlight and by the solar wind. In the White Mountains, the long-dead bristlecone pine, as timeless as the comet itself, awaits to greet another messenger from the far reaches of our Solar System. This may be the first naked eye comet in two or three decades, but to the bristlecone, patient as ever, it is one of many to have displayed their ephemeral beauty, a mere twinkle against the backdrop of unchanging stars rising to greet the long-lived witnesses to our history night after night, year after year, century after century...
The Milky Way Rises above a cascade in the Ansel Adams Wilderness. Photographed August 2020.
Stars rise four minutes earlier each day, so that over the course of several months, Orion goes from a "winter constellation," which means it's visible during the convenient evening hours, to a rare pleasure glimpsed just before dawn gathers to itself the black of night and slowly spreads in its stead the blues, oranges, and finally the reds of the impending Sun. In a corner of Navajoland made famous for its buttes and spires, the eager Sun will arrive too soon and rob me of one last look at Orion before the chase for sunrise begins in earnest.
