Time

The concept of time, our perception of it, and the funny things that happen to it under the extreme ends of the standard model of physics have always fascinated me. This photo alone was a measured 15 seconds, and collected photons ranging from a few microseconds old to millions, if not billions of years old. In areas of dense gravitational fields and high velocities, such as that experienced in the galactic core, time dilates in ways most of us can't even imagine, outside of running some calculations on a page. But it's fascinating to me that sometime, perhaps billions of years ago, before the earth was even a cloud of dust, a photon was formed deep inside a star in a galactic core. It spent its first few million years just leaving the very star it was formed in, for at the velocity of that star orbiting the center of gravity, what appears to be a few moments is millions of years to an outside observer. Then that photon, finally free of its own star begins a tortuous path escaping the gravity of all the nearby stars, black holes, and more, before finally rushing into a thinner portion of the galaxy. After millions more years, the photon is now beyond the rim and traveling alone through the empty space between galaxies. Eventually, that photon found its way through another galaxy, into a solar system with nine (nine, damnit!) planets, zeroing in on a small blue marble in orbit of another sun, passing through clouds of dust, and eventually finding its way into the sensor of my camera where its energy is transferred to the slightest few electrons for recording. Ironically, or perhaps most fittingly, my camera was perched atop a cliff, named a few hundred years ago as the "Twenty Minute Cliff." The cliff got its name from the settlers of the valley below: during harvest time, when the cliff was the last thing directly illuminated by our sun, it would signify twenty minutes until darkness consumed the valley.
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