This morning my dad and I sat at the kitchen table and sipped coffee and finally watched the videos of Perseverance landing on Mars. We both teared up at the end when the folks at NASA were jumping up and down and cheering and crying and hugging and it was a good time.

I am more than peripherally aware of this kind of thing right now because I’m taking an Astronomy class from a professor who is absolutely head over heels in love with his subject, who wants to share that feeling of wonder with each of his students. It’s kind of lovely to see.

Studying things that scientists know about space and galaxies and stars does more for me than just offer perspective. I think that the things I’m learning are beautiful. Every little detail is so neat that it’s actually charming.

The light that reaches the earth today was formed in the heart of the sun about a million years ago. It takes a million years for the gamma rays, born when hydrogen smashes together to form helium and matter is converted into energy, to make it from the middle of the sun out the edges. Once the gamma rays make it to the edge, they’ve lost some of their energy and aren’t as dangerous for life. It takes about eight minutes for this light to travel – as fast as anything in the universe can travel – from the sun to the earth, and by the time it reaches us, the atmosphere around the earth has made the light that reaches us safe for life to continue to thrive.

But the light that rains down on the earth today was born about a million years ago and I think that this is beautiful.

Light is old.

Learning about the universe feels like getting to know a person, a person with lots of little interesting quirks and dark places and vast swaths of secrets they haven’t told anybody yet. But the universe might tell her secrets, one day, if we learn how to communicate with each other.

I hope it’s a good morning, today. Sometime, take a second to notice the light.