starry starry night and day

i love this painting.
it is profoundly, heart-stoppingly beautiful.
stirring, painterly and mystical, the colours shimmer and hum.
and its subject is something intrinsically beautiful which lends another quality, another level of experience.
i find a similar resonance and shimmering quality in the rings of katherine bowman, especially her random rings with their constellations of gems and engravings
i don't think the wonder of stars and the night sky ever ceases. it hits you whenever you look up and look.
not just glancing up, but gazing at the stars.
and watching the night sky away from the cities is even better of course. the depth of the galaxy is deeper, blacker - the absence between the stars.
i've never camped under the stars - i've always had a protective sheath of tenting between me and the night, but it's something i long to do.
my sister went to uluru for her 40th birthday and saw the skies there. she says she never saw the sky so dark or the stars so bright. i would love to see those skies and hear their stories.
this is the emu

Not all constellations are seen by using imaginary lines joined from star to star. Many Australian Aboriginal groups used the dark patches that they could see in the night sky to trace out shapes. A good example is a giant emu that was seen by many of the people who live in the western central desert of Australia... The head of the emu is marked by a conspicuous dark cloud that is easily seen in the country and also visible in the city depending on light pollution levels...located within the constellation of ... the Southern Cross... The long neck of the celestial emu, extends down dark lanes through Centaurus and the body into the dark lanes of Scorpio. The celestial emu is truly a large and spectacular sight for those who get the opportunity to get away from the pollution of the city.

source

i recently heard about another art piece that makes us look to the skies - nancy holt's sun tunnels. at first they look like great concrete pipes (which they kind of are), but she has placed them in the desert - they are exactly positioned to catch the sunrise and sunset at solstice.
One of the wonderful features of the Sun Tunnels is the series of holes drilled in each of the concrete tubes. Without knowing what they were, you would be tempted to think they were just holes that make for terrific viewing of the desert and mountains beyond, but in fact, they have a very specific purpose. The holes come in four sizes, either 7, 8, 9, or 10 inches in diameter), and according to Holt, "each tunnel has a different configuration of holes corresponding to stars in four different constellations--Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn. "The sizes of the holes vary relative to the magnitude of the stars to which they correspond."
from here

there is a lovely frieze article which "revisits" holt's place in the sun
images on this article are pretty