I get up in the pre-dawn hours to sit in my hot tub, staring at the stars overhead. This morning was a clear, moon-less, sky. Because I am in California, in the northern hemisphere this morning’s sky featured some of my best “friends” including Orion, Gemini, Canis Major, Leo and of course the big bear Ursa Major steadily pointing to the north star, Polaris. I laid my head back on the edge of the hot tub so I could take in the entire sky and realized that I COULD see the entire sky, from horizon to horizon (plus a little) in all directions. That got me to thinking about how amazing our eyes, and ability to see, actually are. Our perception, including our eyes and our brain, work much different than a camera or a telescope. Looking straight up it like a “fisheye” lens where the entire doom of the sky (and a little ground all around) is visible and clear, but what we “see” is not uniform. The edges are there, and clear, but very hard to concentrate on. My concentration is almost all in the very center, surrounded by slowly decreasing levels of attention, not decreasing levels of clarity so much as what I can attend to with my mind. But let anything move, such as a satellite or a “shooting star” enter the edges of my attention and I “notice” it instantly. Then I shift my center of attention and see it clearly. I don’t have to focus on things to notice movement or change. How odd — telescopes don’t do that (or at least they didn’t use to – perhaps they do with artificial intelligence scanning the entire image looking for things such as movement – just like my brain is obviously doing). I found it amazing, and rather awe inspiring to notice what I CAN notice – and all of it built up over millions of years of evolution one little step at a time.