The Door to Nature

I love this photograph because it beautiful in some way, and because it is so incongruous. Incongruous because there is a beautiful photograph of the natural world, out a dark and perhaps foreboding doorway. But what kind of doorway - it appears to be way up in the air, and there is a railing in front of the door. Fun to contemplate where this might be. But of course you know me by now. It is an astronomical observatory here in Virginia - Fan Mountain, to be exact - and the doorway is to the catwalk around the dome - a dome that is 30 feet in the air. That is why there is such a strange perspective in the photograph, and such a sense that something is not quite right. But I love that it is quite beautiful as well.