Astronomers like to explore the stars in the heavens on nights when the moon puts in a late appearance, or fails to show at all. On such evenings, stargazers from Southern California arrive in droves, telescopes in tow, in the parking lot below the summit of Mount Pinos (8831 feet above sea level), north of Los Angeles, California. (Red light, which doesn't overwhelm the human eye, is used to mark and illuminate the 'scopes and their controls.)


For the Chumash Indians, Mount Pinos was - and is - the center of the universe. How fitting the slopes of the sacred mountain serve as an important site for those who seek new kinds of meaning found beyond our own world.

While I hoped to find new meaning to my own life, I found instead innumerable astronomers willing to let me share their views of the cosmos. Using a rolled-up serape I placed on the the ground to serve as a support for my camera, I was able to make my own vision of both the world below and the heavens above.