The sky at night made the news on 28th February, when all the other seven planets were visible at once.
It reminded me of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his brutal schooling at Christ’s Hospital in the 1780s. The headmaster, James Bowyer, flogged his pupils mercilessly. He threw a copy of Homer at one boy so hard that it knocked his tooth out.
To escape these miseries, 16-year-old Sam would climb out of a window at night, lie on the lead roof and look upwards. He later wrote:
‘At eve, sky-gazing in “ecstatic fit” (Alas! For cloister’d in a City School, The sky was all I knew of beautiful.)’
We town mice cloister’d in the city know how the poet feels. Life is spent on pavements, on roads and in underpasses. Massive cranes and sinister glass buildings loom over us as we scurry about. To gaze at the stars in the evening would be a truly pleasant pursuit. So I bought a pair of strong binoculars and a tripod.
Largely, I am afraid to report, my stargazing endeavours have been disappointing, mainly because the sky in London is just too light and cloudy. The starlight rarely penetrates the veil that covers the city.
The only otherworldly thing we get to see regularly with much clarity is the moon. Coleridge clearly enjoyed moon- gazing too. At Christ’s Hospital, he wrote a sonnet, To the Autumnal Moon. He hailed the moon as ‘Mother of wildly- working visions’. I, too, gazed at it through my magnifiers for a few happy moments.
Go half an hour outside London, though, and you will be rewarded by a far more spangly sky. By luck I was in a Kentish village on the day when the seven other planets were briefly visible.
There were a lot of stars up there, too. Some of them are so far away that they no longer exist. My friend, an amateur astrologer, showed us around: ‘You can see Venus clearly up there, and Mercury. The planets don’t twinkle – only stars do that.’ He showed us Orion’s Belt and the Plough.
And, yes, I felt even smaller and more insignificant than I normally do, and for a brief moment longed to be a country mouse again.
I long to learn more about the stars. I feel woefully underinformed. Until fairly recently – the 17th century – education included astronomy. The old Trivium consisted of grammar, logic and rhetoric – intellectual skills. Then you would move on to studying the world via the Quadrivium, comprising arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. Put them together and you get the seven liberal arts.
Still, there are plenty of brilliant stargazers around, and we’d do well to learn from them. My acquaintance Chris Lintott has an enviable job title: he is Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford. He is very much not stuck in an ivory tower, and is evangelical about his subject.
As well as his Oxford job, he is 39th Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, London. He has recorded several lectures for this excellent institution, available free on the Gresham College website. It’s all part of their mission, ongoing since 1597, to educate the public for nothing.
One of Prof Lintott’s favourite themes is the unimaginable vastness of the universe and man’s relative unimportance. Advances in telescope technology have made astronomers realise that we’re even tinier than we thought we were, in relative terms.
‘The universe is really big,’ the Prof says. ‘We live on an ordinary star in an ordinary universe. When you look up, you should realise you’re looking at a tiny selection of a few hundred billion stars that make up the Milky Way galaxy.’
The stars, planets and moon remind us we are members of the cosmos. Sky-gazing returns us to a consideration of God’s creation and takes us beyond our self-built earthly caves.
The philosophical emperor Marcus Aurelius thought stargazing was good for the soul. He called the stars and planets ‘the hosts of heaven’ and praised ‘their orderly system, and their nakedness, and their purity, for there is no veil before a star’.
Whether you’re lying on a roof in the city or in a field in the country or looking through a telescope, night skies produce the healthy emotions of wonder – and humility.
And who knows? Like Coleridge, you may even experience an ecstatic fit.
