Windows on the frontier

I sit in front of my window; the view is spectacular and always changing. And what you see depends on how you make your observation. If I look the standard way, I see that we are somewhere over China looking past the Himalayans into India. If I open my senses to the night I see aurora with its greens and reds. If I let the images slide past in constant blur I see star trails and streaks from the lights on Earth. Three different observations all made from the same window with the same planetary view. Thousands of images have been previously recorded from this very window by dozens of crewmembers however what I see now adds new information to our database simply because of the way I chose to make these observations. When on the frontier, the concept of “been there, done that” does not apply. I understand on Earth some humans will abstain from exploring simply because someone else might have been there before.