title: Celestial Yosemite
author: Kristal Leonard
description: <div><B>Kristal Leonard</B> is a visual artist specializing in landscape photography and astrophotography. She has worked extensively in Yosemite, California, her home for more than 17 years. Always fascinated with the night sky, she shares her photos of the night sky with a growing fanbase and collectors alike.<BR></div>
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  2373
  
  PROLOGUE
  
  It was a lifeless husk-its back broken, its skin rent, its mammoth form half
  buried in the shifting sands of a mountainous dune-and it was even more
  beautiful than Jadzia Dax remembered.
  
  Her second host, Tobin Dax, had watched the Earth starship Columbia NX-02
  leave its spacedock more than two hundred years earlier, on what no one then
  had realized would be its final mission; Tobin had directed the calibration of
  its starboard warp coils. A pang of sad nostalgia colored Jadzia's thoughts as
  she stood on the grounded vessel's bow and gazed at its shattered starboard
  nacelle, which had buckled at its midpoint and lay partially reclaimed by the
  dry waves of the desert.
  
  Engineers from Defiant swarmed over the primary hull of the Columbia. They
  took tricorder readings in between shielding their faces from the scouring
  lash of a sand-laced sirocco. Behind them lay the delicate peaks of a desolate
  landscape, a vista of wheat-colored dunes shaped 