The Sun is 400 times bigger then the Moon and also 400 times further away and that is why a total eclipse is as remarkable as it is, the Sun blacked out by the dark side of the Moon, which we otherwise couldn't see, but still the fiery corona visible, lashing out from its surface.I was a junior astronomer with my plastic telescope that cost 3/6, having had my dad explain the Plough, Orion and Cassiopeia on dark winter nights in Nottingham. I was taken to a department store to see Father Christmas, aged 5 or 6, and was told to think of what I wanted for Christmas because that was what he would ask.
I said I'd like some books on Astronomy.
Well, ask him for that, then, I was advised. But I knew he wouldn't have any and I felt a bit embarrassed about it, either on my own account or for him, so when the moment came, I just said I'd like some books. And when I unwrapped it, it was a pop-up book of Cinderella. I was disappointed but it was my fault. But Father Christmas did bring the Observers Book of Astronomy and another one called Stars, both of which I still have as well as one I authored myself at school, called Space.
There is less point in stargazing now, living in the city, whose lights don't shine but glare. Anything below a second magnitude star is barely visible and so once you've looked at the main constellations, and checked if any planets are about, that's it. But it is still a minor thrill to follow the tail of the Great Bear down to find Arcturus, alpha Bootes, which was always my favourite star. I thought I'd once seen Antares, in Scorpio, and even Fomalhaut, low down on the horizon, not usually very easy to see from our latitude but the days of comet Halle-Bopp were probably a highlight, in the 1990's, a smear of light over in the East for a few weeks.
Betelgeuse, in Orion's shoulder, is likely to come to the end of its life soon, which means any time in the next million years. It would be a supernova, visible in the day time, for a short while before disappearing from sight. It would be odd to see Orion with Betelgeuse suddenly missing and in a way I hope I don't live to see that, although it would be quite an occasion. It's unlikely we will see that, none of us, no human at all.
Because all the speculation about space travel and properly colonizing any other place in space is absurd. It takes eight minutes for light to get here from the Sun, over three quarters of an hour from Jupiter and 7.8 years from Sirius. It does seem amazing that it is only just over 100 years since the Wright brothers achieved any sort of flight and sixty years later men had flown to the Moon and back. And, thus, if such progress could continue exponentially, perhaps we could fly at the speed of light and reach nearby stars in a decade but they might not have suitably accommodating planets to land on when we got there.
The length of time we have been on this planet is a microscopic fraction of the time the Earth has been here and there is every chance we might not last as long again into the future. We will have come and gone in a blink and our chances of being here when any passing visiting aliens arrive are thus very slim indeed, never mind any chance we might have of finding anybody else out there.
We speculate and imagine ourselves the measure of it, measuring everything, quite naturally, in terms of ourselves. But we are not clever enough. A chair isn't clever enough to know it is a chair and that it was made by a carpenter and the same applies to us, we are not meant to know why we are here, and can't.
And so, rather than resort to existential anxiety, it is preferable to look and enjoy. All the stars that make up the constellations are in our galaxy, the rest of the galaxy being in the Milky Way, the blurry band of light that is our view of the spiral of stars that we are somewhere towards the edge of. The Arcturus that we see is Arcturus 37 years ago, but the Andromeda Galaxy we see is the Andromeda Galaxy of 2.5 million years ago, and the furthest known galaxy is apparently 13 billion light years away, so, realistically, travelling at the speed of light for 13 billion years, we are not going to get there, are we. According to much science fiction, if we did get there, we would find beings living there that looked like highly magnified locusts or mosquitoes. I don't think we would. I just think that shows the limits of our imagination, based as it is on things we have seen.
But whether one enjoys the glorious pictures of such things, wonders if one could do a good time trial on a bike with the 1000 mph winds on Neptune behind you, or just appreciate the art work of a little Nottingham schoolboy from the 1960's, I will always be grateful for the nights out in the garden when my dad showed me the Plough.The other good thing about Astronomy, of course, is that by studying the stars, you know what is going to happen to you every day, or you can just look it up in the paper. I'm a Libra and I've just looked up my horoscope on horoscope.com and it says,
Obstacles may arise in the course of your chores when machines break down and interfere with your efficiency.
And, there you go, that proves it. The stars know what the computers are like in our office. Although, to be fair, they could say that every day.
