Word: skies
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Finally content that I have wasted enough natural resources for a night, I abandon the fire and step into the frigid night, where the sky is as crowded as it is quiet. I look for the new constellations I have learned. I take in the extraordinary silence and solitude...
...tropical sky, night falls almost instantly, and the navigational instruments now cast a greenish glow around the skipper. A fixed-wing "Islander" heads back to base at Horn Island as a Coastwatch helicopter (or "helo") code-named Lima 51 flies in to assist in the search; a forward-looking infra-red (flir) detection system in the helo's nose checks out the hides that have been cut in the mangroves around the island. No luck. Returning to base, the helo calls in to report that it's clocked a vessel 10 nautical mi. away, at 108 degrees. There's restrained...
...many Aboriginal paintings, as if from above. "He went in here," she says, jabbing at a blue dot slightly off-center. And though the ancient people who first told this story could never have known how close their falling-star story was to scientific truth, the desert's night sky is so black - and the shooting stars so brilliant against it - that even the city-bred feel their imagination expanding...
...left into the desert. Twenty km on, the rim comes into view. Its 35-m slopes seem high after a few hours of traveling in only two dimensions, but a brief scramble over the rocks puts you on the lip. A wedge-tailed eagle, glossy black against the sunburnt sky, patrols the circumference in majestic sweeping curves. Chunks of broken sandstone glow a warm pale orange; welded under and around them are balls of rust-colored shale, their surfaces pitted and folded - oxidized remnants of the meteorite. New nickel-bearing minerals were found here, one named reevesite after the crater...
...Shaw leans back against a huge fallen eucalypt, shaking his head. "I feel no need to go in," he says, black beanie pulled down low against the chill. "I'll just sit here and listen to the scrub." Wind roars in the canopy above and the sullen Tasmanian winter sky threatens rain or worse. In layers of thermals, waterproof trousers and parkas, gloves sodden from slippery branches, Shaw and other members of the local Aboriginal community have scrambled for an hour through steep rainforest to reach this spot in the island's wild southwest. Here at the base...