The suburban country diarist, away from suburbia, must seize every opportunity. Here on the south‑west coast of the Isle of Wight, the birds are different (skylarks, lapwings, black-tailed godwit); the butterflies are different (marbled white, wall, white admiral). But the night sky is, frankly, unrecognisable.
London’s familiar dirty orange glow is replaced by a clarity of light and a depth of dark that is unimaginable for a city dweller. There are fewer and fewer places free of the creeping spectre of light pollution – and we are staying in one of them.
We find a place. We sit. We wait. The rookery over the road settles down for the night, caw of rook and chack of jackdaw fading into silence. Light wind, few clouds, no moon. Good stargazing conditions. Good enough for us, at least.
Slowly, as dusk yields to dark, they reveal themselves. I wonder at the expert’s ability to identify a single star from the random scatter in the sky, and the imagination of our ancestors to construct real and mythical creatures from those infinite join-the-dot patterns. Blissfully ignorant of the details, I’m happy to lie back and contemplate the incalculable vastness of the universe.
I do know one, though. Most people do. The Plough. Or, if you prefer, the Big Dipper. Or, as I call it – and given that constellations should be named after things we recognise, I’m amazed it hasn’t caught on – the Saucepan. Seven bright stars forming a distinctive shape, recognisable to even the most novice star watcher.
As always, I spend a minute looking at the star at the tip of the saucepan’s handle. Alkaid. It is, give or take, 103 light years distant. Which means, give or take, that the blue-white light reaching my eyes today started its journey around the time my father was born. Look at the night sky for any length of time and big thoughts are inevitable.
The darkness intensifies. The International Space Station rolls smoothly overhead. We give it a wave, as we always do. A shooting star. Not, as so often, uncertainly glimpsed in the corner of my eye, but seen and followed from first flash to disappearance. A second in the eyes, a lifetime in the memory.
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