My God... it's full of stars!

We had a brief power outage during the night, from about 1 - 2 AM. My wife and I were up, so we burned some candles and talked for a while, but when I went outside to see how widespread it might be, I was once again awe struck by the beauty of the stars.

All the street lights and other forms of light pollution were gone. I had forgotten how dark the night could be. We've just had a new moon, so the only light to see was from the stars & visible planets.

Every star has its own color, and I also saw Mars & Saturn to the South, Jupiter to the West. Mars was as blood red as always. No wonder it represents the god of war.

I was only outside briefly, but I haven't seen it this dark locally since I was on Guam. When we'd have an outage there, in the interval before the generators kicked in for the runway lights, it was perhaps as dark as I've ever seen the world.

Over 1,000 miles from the Philippines, nearly 4,000 from Hawai'i, in the middle of nowhere in the vast Pacific.

At those times, the stars seem almost so close that you can touch them.

(From 2010: The Year We Make Contact)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V68pnTJwjQU