It took a long time to find the right sort of world: a small, rocky place, shielded from the virulence of stellar radiation by the distorted onion-layer shapes of magnetic field lines. World on which humans may live are not as rare as one might think, but not so common as to reveal themselves to unfussy scrutiny. The galaxy is a big place and so human ambitions must match its casual largesse. It took a long time to forget earth, and what we had done there; memories of the ancestral planet are coded—it would seem—in the very nucleotide sequences of Human DNA. We are, indeed, creatures of Earth, in need of water and a single moon. We are—we have learned—creatures of the tides; our blood is the primordial ocean in which we were spawned. It remembers itself, and the way in which it danced: tugged by the moon. Without tides, Humans grow restive, insane, depressed. Humans are fragile creatures, in need of a planet (not too large and not too small) circled by a single moon (not too large, and not too small.) One may dwell on the face of a world attended by multiple moons: but only if they are small and do not disrupt the tides that shape human life. We found a suitable world and named her Penelope, for reasons as mythic as our own most ancient epics. Penelope, we decided, was as good a name as any, for a world that seemed to wait for the arrival of humankind. She is a large and water-rich planet. She circles the mother sun at a range of 1.5 astronomical units—half a unit farther from her mother sun as Earth from Sol. And like long-vanished Earth, Penelope is attended by a single, faithful moon. Where Luna carried a female personality, Penelope’s moon is decidedly masculine, and so we have named him Telemachus. Many who now dwell on the face of Penelope worship Telemachus as The Guardian Moon, shielding his mother from the advances of unworthy suitors. Penelope and Telemachus are (collectively) our new home, and I hope that the lessons we taught ourselves with Earth and with Luna, will bear fruits in the future, and that the mistakes we make will spare the worlds that support us. —Anonymous/Unpublished Journal found under a rock ** I took this picture last spring: on the first appreciably warm day. I’d wandered with Corey, with Kate, and with Steve, looking—as myth might say—for a lighthouse. As myth might have it, we approached a beach and the promise of languid relaxation in perfect, cloudless sunlight. We fortified ourselves against the wiles of sand and water. Well, actually, we just didn’t bring beach towels, swimwear, and little plastic buckets good for building sandcastles, and so we wandered on and eventually found the lighthouse. I took this picture at random. I liked it but I felt it needed something before it could—at least figuratively—see the light of day. And so—months later—I added a moon, and a fairly big one at that. I rather like it, and so here it is. I classified this as "photo manipulation" because of the added moon (itself drawn from a manipulated macro shot of a brick) done with the Gimp. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.