We stood in the middle of a desert, faces upturned. We were about an hour from Arequipa, and had been watching the sky cycle through shades of peachy orange, deep periwinkle, and finally to black. We asked our driver to pull over briefly, to allow us to step out and take in the scene that lay before us now. Sandy mounds stretched out into an endless expanse the color of charcoal. Moonlight illuminated the ground, just barely distinguishing the earth from the atmosphere on the far away horizon. The sky exploded with starlight. Thousands, millions of white specks glistened as if cast into the sky with the splatter of a great brush soaked in iridescent paint. As populous and varied as mankind, they came in different sizes and shades and degrees of luminescence. Some clustered together, while others proudly stood isolated. Some seemed so far away that they strained to be visible, while others were just barely out of reach. They hovered above us in a swirling pattern, tremendous to the point of challenging my comprehension. I struggled to accept that these same stars existed in all of the night skies I had ever stood beneath, but they had been invisible to me.