About 25,000 years ago, the last of the Neandertals wandered about Europe; giant sloths and woolly mammoths wandered about as the planet experienced its last great Ice Age. Photons from a brilliant collection of stars in a pocket of our galaxy started a long journey through the cold emptiness of space.

A few hours earlier, I had set up my scope to cool down while I warmed up inside with a cup of coffee.

Most astronomic objects work better in photographs than looking through the lens with one's eye. A camera can keep its "eye" open for hours at a time, collecting enough photons to discriminate colors and details a human eye can not pick up. Today's CCD cameras allow amateur astronomers to create flaming ribbons of color in just a few minutes of viewing.

Still some of us prefer our eyes, wandering outside in the dead of night, sharing the starlight with skunks and possums as we catch the gray shadows of objects that barely reflect the dazzling tricolor images in books sitting on the coffee table inside. A photon travels through 25,000 light years of nothingness before striking a rod in the back of my eye, triggering an impulse to my brain that I see as light.

For 25,000 years, before Moses, before Abraham, before written language, the photon traveled.

I set up my 10" mirror in my backyard, collecting photons with my glass net. The mirror has been ground just so to get the photons to come to a point, which I focus on the back of my retina. Millions of photons from this tiny, tiny piece of sky fall on the patio, the grass, on my shoulders, invisible to me. My mirror collects a tiny handful of photons, enough to grab the interest of the rods on my retina, and my brain makes an image.

As the photons pass through our atmosphere, they are often diverted just a tiny bit from their jouney--photons that traveled side by side for eons now wobble in their path. The image remains blurry.

I watch, minutes turn into hours...suddenly, the skies dissolve and turn transparent. Like a fisherman who has been trying to stare through the ripples in a pond, I am rewarded when the ripples fall flat, and I am allowed to see what only so few have seen. The Hercules cluster, hundreds of thousands of stars in one tiny piece of our galaxy, emerging through the eyepiece like a swarm of diamond bees, appearing impossibly solid and vibrant, alive, not of this Earth.

Globular clusters are one of the few objects that look better through the lens of a telescope than in a book. There are no greens and reds and blues to draw ahs and oohs--simply the dazzling intensity of thousands of stars gravitationally bound together.

I imagine living on a world inside the cluster, the sky exploding with multiple suns, no darkness to fear, no way to know the rest of the galaxy exists. And for a moment, I forget as well, only knowing the lovely brilliance of a ball of stars, now blurring as my eye tears up.