Even though I tend to stay up late, I am usually at home early. A few years ago, I wouldn’t think twice about being out and about late into the night and into the single digits of the clock. Tonight I ended up being on the road past midnight due to a combination of things: late dinner with friends; having to wait for an available supercharger, and of course, traffic.

It is always a wonderful pleasure to be driving at night. The expression “night and day difference” is often used to exaggerate a drastic change or to contrast two vastly different things. It’s used so often that the power of those words lose their effect, but the truth is that there probably exists no greater contrast than between night and day. The obvious difference is the amount of light you can see. There is more light during the day…but is there really? It is certainly more intense, but at night we witness the light from trillions of galaxies and the hundreds of billions of stars in each of them. Much of it is unbelievably ancient light from incredible distances. And beneath this spectacular window into our universe, we create our own galaxies of light with our cities. We are a diurnal animal whose curiosity for the night sky led us to conquer the night by creating our own light. I like to think this was a necessary evolutionary step as this diurnal animal begins to set sail into the night sky.