“We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.” Rudyard Kipling’s faint voice from 1891 has seemed more relevant than ever to me over the past few months. Winter is here; so in the crisp -25 deg C (-13 F) air I headed out for a stroll onto Ness lake at around 2am last night under the light of the setting moon as if to check that I was still alive. In the distance the mesmerizing glow of the Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis some thousands of km away in the Yukon, and the eerie sounds from the ice stress fracturing, quickly cleared my mind of other thoughts. The frozen lake, free of snow, has developed frost flowers over the past few days which create an amazing texture. The flowers grow from the moisture in the supersaturated vapor found directly above the ice that is caused by the sublimation of ice into the extremely dry, cold air. Ness Lake, British Columbia, Canada
Milky Way rising high above a fog filled Wollombi Valley with the Watagan mountain range and the city lights of the NSW Central Coast in the background. New South Wales, Australia
A sixteen shot panorama of the milky way over the Warrumbungles. The area has little light pollution to disturb astronomical viewing and is home to the Siding Spring observatory which is has more than a $100 million in scientific equipment including 44 telescopes. The largest is the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT), a 3.9-metre equatorially mounted telescope, sits at an altitude of a little over 1,100 m and was ranked in 2009 as the fifth highest-impact of the world's optical telescopes. New South Wales, Australia
