Ross Kerridge was taking in the sunrise when he noticed the sun's mystical connection to Nobbys breakwall.
"Lots of possibilities for urban legends here. Maybe the convicts had connections with the Druids [Celtic pagans] at Stonehenge," Ross quipped.
"Either way a pagan festival once a year could be a bit of fun."
Topics would certainly attend. But who would bring the witch's brew?
The Sun Shines
Speaking of the sun, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft has been flying through space watching our giant life-giving star non-stop for about a decade.
From its orbit in space around Earth, the spacecraft has gathered 425 million high-resolution images of the sun over 10 years. [Geez, that would take up a lot of cloud computing space]
"This information has enabled countless new discoveries about the workings of our closest star and how it influences the solar system," a NASA statement said.
The observatory was launched for NASA's Living With a Star program, which was designed to "understand the causes of solar variability and its impacts on Earth".
It helps provide understanding of the sun's influence on Earth and near-Earth space by studying the solar atmosphere.
Col Maybury, president of the Astronomical Society of the Hunter, said he loves "the sheer complexity of suns, their variations in size, colour and scope, the number in our galaxy and all the galaxies in the universe".
Col notes that the byproduct of suns are warmth and gravity, along with charged particles that cause the aurora australis and aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights and southern lights - those otherworldly and marvellous shimmering colours in the night sky.
Col said it was an "amazing coincidence" that the moon at 400,000 kilometres away and the sun at 150 million kilometres away "appear the same size by half a degree and periodically totally eclipse".
He loves the changing seasons as "the sun strikes Earth at different angles".
He notes the "finality of the death of stars" and the "slow death of the giant red stars, sloughing off material for thousands of years" before causing the "mother of all nuclear explosions" known as a supernova.
Then there's those "eerily dangerous, frighteningly powerful and mystical black holes". Col also reminded us of the "daily beauty of the sunrise and sunset".
Which brings us back to Nobbys. Have you been out to see a sunrise or sunset lately? If not, why not?
Sun Jokes
Son: Dad, can you tell me what a solar eclipse is? Dad: No sun.
I stayed up all night wondering where the sun went ... then it dawned on me.
If Google Maps asks me to rate the sun, I'll give it no more than one star.
The sun doesn't have to go to university. It already has 15 million degrees.
