"The soft silver Drips shimmering Over the garden nights," Carl Sandburg wrote in his poem, Under the Harvest Moon, and we like to think about that silver globe, a quarter million miles away, as it contrasts with the bright pin of Mars, thirty-four million miles out.

The sense of those vast distances enfolds us, comforts us, making some of the vast troubles enfolding our own globe this autumn seem smaller and more transitory. Perhaps the heavens will provide that perspective for still others, sixty thousand years from now.