Midnight Madness

If you've never been on Bonaire on New Year's eve. you are missing something truly amazing. People are shooting off fireworks the whole evening. But at midnight the explosions multiply and blur together into a island wide roar. Shortly before midnight, I went to one of the dirt roads part way up the hill between the WEB power plant and Republik. There were full-on professional quality fireworks bursting everywhere I looked: to the North in Hato, to the West along hotel row, to the south downtown, and to the east in Republik. Now I like fiddling around with audio systems, heck it's job related, but I think one would have a tough time reproducing the auditory and physical impact of what I experienced that night.
And then there were the pretty colors and shapes. It's a real feast for the senses, assuming that you have nerves of steel. Our dogs don't like New Years Eve at all. They spent most of the night indoors, slightly sedated, watching TV with Sandra.
I was out in the back yard taking pictures of the stars, because it just happened to be a nice clear moonless night. I also got to enjoy the fireworks bursting all around me!
Above is a picture of the galaxy, M33, located towards the bottom of the picture, left of center; as well as Comet Tuttle, in the upper part of the picture left of center. Comet Tuttle is getting a little brighter each night, but it is still pretty dim. The comet was right by M33 the previous night, but we were completely clouded out here on Bonaire.
This picture of comet Holmes is at the same scale as the one of Tuttle and M33, so you can see how much bigger Holmes appears.