The Digital Stone Age
Once in a while I like to spend some time under the stars. As I say to my friends and colleagues, that’s my quarter of an hour of freedom. From family, from work, from iPhone, …pure peace. The stars above me and the Nature around. I did it also this week end.
I put my small scope, the digital camera, the pocket sky atlas and the deckchair in my car and drove up in the mountains (3280 feet high) to my quiet location where I'm used to observe. I've arrived there at 10PM, the sky was crystal clear but still not dark. While mounting the scope, the stars and planets popped one by one like flowers in a spring field. Jupiter on the west side than Vega up at the Zenith and then all the others. Gorgeous. In an hour it was dark and milky way carved in the sky above me.
The sky was particularly beautiful due to a very strong wind that swept the Jura the day before. I spent some time on my deckchair sweeping the clouds of the milky way by eye and with the binoculars down South, near the horizon, in the tail of the Scorpio. I then only lazily looked through the scope, marveled by the starry night above me.
In an excess of egotechnology I’ve taken a selfie with the milky way as background, doped by easytechnology I’ve managed to connect my camera (EOS M3) to the iPhone and sharing that with my friends via Whatsapp. What I got back was a kind of digital rock Art. No, don't imagine broken guitars but literally human-made markings placed on natural digital stone.
Only Emoticons. An impressive list of those. Would say almost 25, from different people, in the middle of the night. Ok, we are the society of fast communication....
There, in my deckchair under the Stars, all that reminded me the graffiti of the Camuni, a population from the Northern Italy that left behind impressive traces (stone carvings) of their daily life spread on all surfaces of the Val Camonica. The collection of drawings was recognized by Unesco in 1979 and was Italy's first recognized World Heritage Site.
If you aim to Northern Italy, stop there with your family. You might recognize a lot of our society in these 140.000 traces...