Chad – ‘I’ve never been somewhere so hot during the day, and so frosty during the night.  The Australian outback was akin to being on another planet.  Beautiful formations of red clay and rock erupt from the Earth; diverse wildlife called out from the distance; the most incredibly dark, inky night skies paved the way for fantastic cosmic light shows each evening.  We traversed the area around Uluru via camel and slept on the desert floor every night.  With our equipment set up on the flattest, hardest area we could find, we pointed our eyes to the sky and imaged through our telescopes all night long.  In this second picture, I remember waking up to the sound of an unfamiliar insect trapped beneath the tarp right around my head.  I woke, flipped up the cover, and found a large (upset) scorpion gesturing that I had covered his hiding hole.  The next day, a local shed some wisdom upon me “Yeah, it’s ‘Straya, there’s a buncha scorpions runnin’ around”  He was correct.’