To the Moon and Back chapter sampler

INTRODUCTION

The Emu in the Sky

True stories have many beginnings. Perhaps the story of Honeysuckle Creek and of man’s journey to the Moon began more than 40,000 years ago, when the people of the Ngunnawal and other Indigenous nations who lived and visited near what would one day be called Honeysuckle Creek gazed up each night between the hills at the Emu in the Sky. When we look up at the night sky we see lines of stars dotted across the blackness. The stars form shapes — Orion’s Belt, the Big Dipper and the Southern Cross. But the shape of the Emu in the Sky is formed from the dark spaces of the Milky Way, not from the stars. Its head is near the Southern Cross, its body stretches across Scorpio and, in winter, its legs reach to the horizon. You can only see the Emu if you are far away from man-made light — in towns there are too many

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