There’s very little I can tell you about this planet. I don’t know its name, and so I can’t tell its story. It exists in a binary star system, but I don’t know the qualities of this system. Does the nameless world circle both suns in a slow and remote orbit? Does it mark an odd figure-eight as it makes its way around one sun before the gravity of its companion pulls it away? Or does it circle one sun alone? I don’t know. Yet. But such mysteries will reveal their answers in time. I am sure of that. *** I made this image in response to a number of stimuli. I’d taken the original picture on Easter morning of 2009, as I wandered back from Quest Internet Services with Corey. We’d spent the night there, watching endless episodes of Star Trek: Voyager on DVD and gorging ourselves on pizza, beer, soft drinks, and chips and dip. One of the joys of extremely social friends who run internet cafes is the fact that you can stay after hours, watching Star Trek episodes on DVD, and spending time on the internet. Of course, if the pizza is delivered after 1:00 am, you’re likely to be awake for quite some time. Corey and Kris and I were awake all night. But we had fun following Captain Janeway and the crew of the USS Voyager through adventures we’d seen many times. As Corey and I left Quest Internet Services, we saw the sun rising over Lake Michigan. It was a cold morning, but beautiful. We spent an hour snapping pictures before the sun moved into a higher, less interesting position. I’d intended to post this picture long ago, but as fate would have it, other images found their way into my gallery first. As is my habit, I tend to keep abreast of all of the odd scientific developments that don’t exactly make it into the mainstream news. Since the early 1990s, I’ve been interested in the ongoing search for Exoplanets (planets that exist outside of our own solar system.) I remember when exoplanets were more hypothetical than real. I remember when we had no images (fuzzy and indistinct though they are) of planets circling other stars. And as of May 31, 2010, 455 such planets are known to exist. We haven’t seen all of them directly, but we know they’re there, by the ways in which they make their parent stars wobble, or by minute shifts in the output of starlight, as one planet or another, passes between its parent star and an earthbound observer. In thinking of exoplanets and looking at pictures taken two Easters ago, I found myself in the mood to do something. As I’d been thinking of—and reading about—exoplanets, I decided to make one out of Lake Michigan. All it really took was the addition of another star just above the horizon. Funny how that works. One minute, you’ve got a perfectly normal picture of a perfectly normal lake…and then, with the addition of one little sparkly thing, you’ve got another sun, and a completely new alien planet. I doubt that any of the exoplanets astronomers have discovered are anything remotely like a life-friendly terrestrial world. Most are more massive than Jupiter, and possess rather strange qualities. At least one of them has been captured in the act of evaporating as it races through a complete orbit once every 2 days. It’s very close to its parent sun, closer than Mercury to our own parent star. And it’s rather spectacular in that it’s shedding its atmosphere, leaving it in a hazy smear of dead planet gunk around its parent sun. Astronomers have managed to capture signs of Earth-like planets as well: Earth-like meaning that they’re made of rock rather than gas. We know very little about them, but it's nice to know that they're there. And so, in honor of exoplanets (455 of them and counting) here's a hypothetical world that looks suspiciously like Lake Michigan with a bit of cosmetic surgery. *** As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you're all having a great week.