When you spend your formative years among geeks, and then attend a geeky college twice to major first in geekdom, then in geekdom management, you occasionally get to reap benefits such as the following sentence: I'd like to wish my friend the astronomer a happy birthday.
It's actually a happy belated birthday, since I missed the actual event, but I figure when you make a living looking at things that actually happened (or rather: were emitted) tens of thousands of years ago, what's a week here or there?
And let me take a moment here to point out once again the confluence of science and poetry: This career scientist not only was with me on the staff of our college literary magazine, but was an extremely talented stage performer as well. He was always the leading man, I was always the comedy relief (see #5 below), but that never bothered me. Really.
Anyway, as Jennifer will attest to, the sky is a beautiful and inspiring place for a poet. And in their truest sense, the scientific and artistic impulses are not that dissimilar. As Livinia Greenlaw said during her tenure as Poet In Residence at the Science Museum in London: "...science stems from human enquiry and our experience of the world. And in that sense it is as subjective as poetry."
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