Meteor Shower

Chicago has a lot of light pollution. This picture was taken around 1am.


But luckily I'm in Evanston now, which looks out at Chicago. Granted, it's not very far:


But far enough so that Evanston's northern sky gets mildly dark. As one of my co-workers pointed out, there is a huge, dark lake stretching to our east.

Luckily, the meteor shower tonight is visible in the northeast sky. So I went out to the lakefront, (on the beach with waves [even though it's a lake, not an ocean or a sea...]) to watch the meteors fall. I only stayed for about 20 minutes, but I saw a few shooting stars.

It was interesting to think about the thousands of miles between each meteors entry point into the atmosphere, but there on the ground, it was only a few degrees in my field of vision. That small turn of the head can translate into vast distances when magnified to the outer reaches of Earth's atmosphere. Pretty cool that huge, inconceivable distances are as close as our own planet's metaphorical doorstep.

But what is an inconceivable distance? A hundred miles? A thousand miles? Ten thousand miles? When was the last time you traveled that far? By land? By car?

By foot?

Will you ever?