Your Monday Photo Shoot: What's in a Name?

I debated with myself about if I would do the Photo Shoot this week over at By the Way or not. See, my first name is boring, my last name is boring, even my nickname.... is boring. BLAH! Finally I decided I would go with my AOL screenname, which also happens to be my identity at most places on the web. Here is the challenge:

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Take a picture of something that relates to your name. It can be your first name, or your last name, or of your middle name (we're not picky). Even nicknames work. And since this is AOL, if you want you may use your screenname as well. Basically, if a name relates to you, let's see a picture of a representation.

My name on AOL (and most other parts of the Internet) is Astaryth. It is unusual enough that I have never been turned down when I've picked it as a sign-in name. Well, except once. Turns out I had a Google account already, but I couldn't remember the passcode nor enough information to get the passcode sent to me. I must have gotten it back in the mid '90's {LOL}.

Why is it always available? Well, probably because I made it up! When I joined AOL way back in the stone age I tried several variation on my real name and my nickname, none were available without adding a number to the end. At the time I was trying out AOL I was already a member of Prodigy... Anyone remember them??? Anyway, I was playing a game over there on their bulletin boards based on the Anne McCaffrey's Pern series of books. My first dragon that I impressed happened to be a Gold. If you are not familiar with the books, a Gold Dragon is not only rare, but the 'highest' color. Apparently the people who ran the 'weyr' thought my writing good enough to award me this honor. If you follow the Pern books you will know that the wonderful telepathic dragons all are born knowing their names AND all dragon names end with th. I named my first gold dragon Astaryth and played her and the character for quite a long period of time.

Back to the screen name dilema. It was getting late in the day, I wanted to try out this service people had been telling me about and in desperation (and the desire not to be known as blank5678) I typed in my name for my Gold Dragon. BINGO! Accepted! And I've used that name (and e-mail address) every since!

Now for a picture to represent my name.... hmmmm.... Well, I thought about one of my pics of a Bearded Dragon, or maybe a Komodo Dragon, but finally decided to pop over to Nasa.org and I offer up:

Three Galaxies in Draco!

There are many other wonderful pictures of galaxies and things over at Nasa.org and, since we all pay taxes, they are free for us to use!