The Yei Bi Chei (Navajo spiritual gods) sandstone structure in Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park (east of the Totem Pole), is a formation of dancers emerging from a hogan. In this image it connects to the night sky's Milky Way, as well as the constellation Orion and several magenta emission nebulae including Orion, Horsehead and Barnard's Loop...This century's light on Yei Bi Chei from most of the stars in Orion is about 700-800 years old. Each star twinkle originated approximately the same time that the Anasazi (Ancient Pueblo) people disappeared from Monument Valley and the Colorado Plateau. At the same time in Europe, the Ottoman Turks defeated the Byzantines and launched an empire that would span 7 centuries. Further north, another new era began with the founding of Oxford and Cambridge universities...Geologically speaking, Orion's light's travel is a wink in time. In geologic antiquity, Monument Valley was a vast lowland basin in the Permian period and these rock formations were a part of it. (Elsewhere on the desert plateau, marine life fossils are commonly found in every cliff.) Over hundreds of millions of years, that basin became a plateau of solid rock 1,000 feet high. For the last 50 million years, natural forces have cut and peeled away the shale and sandstone leaving these monuments as remnants. The formations in this area are about 400 feet high - thin, fragile mementos of epochs gone by...The night lights reveal the past and future, and give clues to the scope of the physical world. If sunlight provides warmth, comfort and clear vision, it also blind us to the magnitude of our insignificance. At night we can see that the entire lump of human history doesn't rate as rounding error in the history of the earth, much less the small portions of the universe that we can see and photograph. ..January 2013