Then there was night. The dry desert air gives up it's heat and brings relief to the scorched land. Nocturnal animals appear and the hard lines of the desert soften into bluish forms in the moonlight.

But more awesome is a moonless night, so dark you cannot even see the hand in front of your face. Scary? Yes, but safe in our yard, I could look up to a velvet sky studded with shimmering stars, so bright and so "close" I would reach up, wishing I could touch them. With a sky so dark, the number of stars visible was overwhelming. The galaxy Andromeda, could be faintly seen as an elongated, faint oval, even without a telescope, if you knew just where to look. The Milky Way, shown below, was so brilliant it was like a river of imagination flowing from horizon to horizon.