What do you see when you look at the stars?

[phillyk]

Could be both literally and metaphorically.

When I was younger, I would go outside and look up at the sky and feel much more relaxed.  It was a combination of realizing just how small we are and looking into my own future.  Could be my next days workload or whatever.  But it was always nice to go out on my own and just look up for a few minutes to get rid of any stress that I was holding onto.  I always wanted to play golf for a living as a kid or dive to the bottom of the mariana trench for biological research. I still hope to do the latter eventually, but I'll stick with a version of the first one.

But once I took a bit of astronomy and astrophysics, I think more about what kind of star am I looking at and it's life cycle.  What's the potential that life is looking down on us from over there somewhere?  I love the night sky now.  I haven't yet gone up to the mountain top to see the whole milky way but it's on my bucket list to do soon.  I can't wait to see it just light up the whole sky.  I enjoy looking at my pinterest that shows random pictures taken by satellites of far away galaxies or random gas clouds producing dazzling light displays or remnants of a star gone supernova.  All the above really.  It seems impossible that all this could happen out there.

There's just something about the stars...

[saevel25]

The fact that the star could not be there anymore and we wouldn't know in our lifetime.

[rkim291968]

Before, I only saw stars.  Now, I see galaxies, black holes, other planets, quasars, ...