On a good dark night, with patient eyes, you can just make out a faint smudge of the Milky Way - a pale breath across the sky, easy to miss, easier to doubt. But the camera is less hurried than we are. Leave the shutter open and it gathers what our eyes let slip: the colors, the depth, the dust lanes and glowing cores, the sheer crowded abundance of it. People sometimes ask if photos like this are "real." They are. All of that is up there, every night, pouring down on us. We're just not built to catch it. The camera doesn't invent the light - it simply refuses to forget it. The night I made this one from our field here in Missouri, something about the composition stopped me. The band of the galaxy slopes down from the upper left; the dark tree line rises to the right. Together they form a sign I learned in grade school math: >. Greater than. And that's exactly what it is. A notation written across the whole sky, pointing past the trees, past the frame, past everything I can see or measure. Greater than this field. Greater than this night. Our solar system, our galaxy, the universe beyond it - infinite, and far past my ability to comprehend. The idea of it has forced me to sit quietly more than once. Not in smallness. In gratitude. Because the unbelievable truth isn't just that all of that exists - it's that we get to stand inside it, look up, and be part of the sum. Some nights the sky shows off. And some nights, if you're lucky, it does math.