I have been thinking a lot lately about the relationships between different views of nature and the universe. In particular as I explore the night sky, I notice how the larger cosmos is an extension of our more familiar natural environment. I have been noticing similarities in otherwise very different photos, whether in form or color or the physical phenomena they represent. I was looking over my photos recently while updating my website and noticed such a nice coincidence: the concentric pattern of a spiderweb and the concentric trails of stars rotating around the celestial pole. Of course these have very little similarity other than the repeated, circular shapes. But it brought home to me again how everything in the universe is related somehow and that nature doesn't stop with what is visible in our day-to-day experience. The vast universe contains many marvels that we can now explore with photography that reveals many views that we cannot experience otherwise.

Circumpolar Star TrailsStar trails over Boulder Mountain taken from the Larb Hollow Overlook on Utah Highway 24. This is a composite of 31 frames, 2 minutes each, for a total exposure of about 1 hour; Nikon D800, 14-24mm f/2.8 @14mm, ISO 800.