11

TO INFINITY AND BEYOND

In which our author gets an inkling of what it’s all about

‘Nature’ is a human construct. And its definition varies depending on who you talk to.

Ask a random passer-by, ‘What is nature?’, and they will most likely talk about the countryside and trees and birds and Springwatch and did you see that programme about the iguana and the snakes?

Ask a botanist and they will talk about flowers and stamens and chlorophyll and probably photosynthesis, because that is after all the very stuff of life.

Ask a particle physicist and soon your head will be full of cotton wool because they tend to bring things like muons and gluons into it, and insist that if you think you understand it you don’t in fact understand it, and the very fact of even thinking about it means that you’ve changed it,* and it all goes around in your brain until you’re a great big sobbing mess.

Say it to an astronomer and they will direct your gaze upwards, not to the great spotted woodpecker drumming at the trunk of a tree, nor even to the cumulonimbus clouds laden with water to dump on your head, but up and beyond to the moon and Ursa Major and Betelgeuse and Orion, and there will be numbers, extremely large ones, and even though you nod and say, ‘Yes, I see’, you don’t see, not really, because it is too big for the human mind to truly comprehend.

Different people see different things.

On 16 July 1969, three adult male humans inserted themselves into a metal box and were propelled into space. They did it, I have to keep reminding myself, voluntarily, and they did it in the interest of human exploration.^†

That eight-day journey – 238,900 miles, give or take,^‡ and the same, more or less, back again – was at the time the longest journey away from earth ever undertaken by humans.^§

Fifty years later, to the day, I set up a telescope and point it towards the night sky. It’s the spotting scope I use for birdwatching – good for things a quarter of a mile distant, less good when it’s a quarter of a million – but it’s better than nothing, and will have to do.

It does.

I don’t need an excuse to look at the moon. It’s the second most visible object in the sky, after all, and there are times when I find it difficult to look away from it, such is the hold it exerts. But tonight I have particular motivation to pay attention to our only natural satellite, our child, formed (we think) 4.5 billion* years ago from the debris of a collision between earth and a Mars-sized planet called Theia.

In one of the cosmic coincidences we love so much, the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo XI launch also saw a partial lunar eclipse. It really would be rude not to, not least because it gives me an excuse to use the word ‘syzygy’ – any word that is two-thirds composed of the final two letters of the alphabet is fine by me.

An eclipse happens when the sun, earth and moon are in syzygy.^† With solar eclipses the order is sun–moon–earth; with lunar eclipses it’s sun–earth–moon. Solar eclipses are more dramatic and glamorous, their particular allure being the result of another cosmic coincidence, the kind that might just persuade me of the possibility of the existence of a supreme being. It is this: the sun is approximately 400 times further away from earth than the moon, and the moon’s diameter is approximately 400 times smaller than the sun’s. So the two objects look the same size in the sky – if the moon were bigger or smaller or closer or further away, this wouldn’t be the case – and when one is in front of the other the effect is, well, dramatic and glamorous. As we have just the one moon,* this is a coincidence worth recognising and celebrating.

The advantage of lunar eclipses over the solar ones is that they happen during the night and you can observe them directly without blinding yourself, and of course in Britain they are far more common. Even then, they’re infrequent enough to make even the part-time skywatcher murmur, ‘Ooh, must remember.’ Total lunar eclipses average out at about one a year; throw in the partials and penumbrals and the count nearly triples.

I happen, on 16 July 2019, to be on the Isle of Wight, in an area of comparatively low light pollution.^† That the moon rises over a calm sea only adds to the occasion. And the complete lack of clouds impeding my viewing can be attributed only to the power of prayer. I’ve been begging for a cloudless night for a week.

I track the moon’s progress across the clear night sky, examining its craters, valleys and mountains as closely as possible. I’ve done enough homework to know that the clearly visible crater, low down on the moon’s surface when viewed from the northern hemisphere, is named Tycho, after the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe,^‡ and I focus for a bit on its silvery luminescence, slightly dulled by the encroaching shadow – our shadow – moving across the top.

I follow one of the tracks leading from Tycho, up and to the right, and my eye lands on a dark area. I zoom in on it.

The Sea of Tranquillity, recipient of Neil Armstrong’s small step half a century ago.

When you know, it’s the first thing you look for. Otherwise it would just be another dark patch, the wonky nose between the Man in the Moon’s eyes. But I find myself seeking it out, and it’s almost impossible to look at it without hearing the crackling audio recordings, picturing the tiny capsule, imagining the thoughts and feelings and experiences of those three men. I try to grasp the feeling, the simultaneous smallness and hugeness of that act, but it’s slippery, as so often when I try to contemplate things beyond the human scale. I try to understand it by thinking of the journey in terms of other journeys more familiar to me. From London to Bristol and back is about 240 miles. Do that a thousand times.* Walk around a bit, then do it again.

Or I could simply ask an Arctic tern to explain it to me.

It feels important to appreciate these distances, to try and understand them. For thousands of years the moon was impossibly remote, an awe-inspiring and constant presence in our skies. Then, overnight, the impossible distance became possible. The moon still holds mysteries, but now we look at it and think, ‘Yes, we can go there.’

And now Mars is next, the huge distance separating us talked about as a feasible journey, as if, having safely made it to Bristol, we’re now planning to drive to Sydney.

I can get my head round these figures, at least enough to be relatively comfortable with the knowledge of our own insignificance, the tininess of our existence in the grand scheme of things. It’s freeing, this knowledge, if you allow it to be, releasing the psyche from existential angst and diverting it towards more mundane matters, such as who invented fig rolls, and what did they have against figs?

But soon one’s understanding of the scale of things spirals out of control, the sheer insignificance of what we regard as mammoth distances made plain as we contemplate what lies beyond.

Best to stick with what we can manage for the moment.

There’s one more feature of the moon’s visible surface I’ve memorised, something I’m keen to locate, or get as close to locating as I can, before the shadow reaches it. I’m not expecting it to be visible through my telescope, but close is better than not at all.

I take a line from Tycho up to another bright spot: Copernicus crater, an island of shine in dark surrounding seas. And then up a bit more, into the broad dull patch called Mare Imbrium,* the Sea of Showers. It’s larger, vaguer than the Sea of Tranquillity – about 700 miles wide, the distance from London to Pisa, Galileo’s birthplace. In that context, an eight-mile crater is tiny. Maybe it’s that little speck just visible in my telescope. Yes. Let’s say it is.

It was tempting, when thinking about the great figures of astronomy, to choose William Herschel, the German-born musician and astronomer who was the first president of the Royal Astronomical Society, and, among other things, discovered Uranus.

And then I read about his sister Caroline and regretfully gave William the old heave-ho.

On the spectrum of women whose potential was thwarted by their gender, Caroline Herschel isn’t at the most disastrous end. She did at least receive recognition for her work in her own lifetime, notching up several firsts for women in scientific fields, and particularly astronomy. But many of her achievements were attained in her brother’s shadow, and while it was thanks to him that she showed any interest in the subject, it’s hard not to wonder what she might have achieved if allowed to do more than act as his amanuensis.

When she joined William in England on the death of their father in 1767, most of her time was spent as his housekeeper and assistant. As well as running the household, her duties included helping him in his astronomical activities, doing ‘nothing . . . but what a well-trained puppy dog would have done’. She pandered to his every need, even being required to put food in his mouth as he worked, and spending hours polishing the lenses of his homemade telescopes.

As his interest in the subject grew, so did her involvement, but any desire she might have had to pursue her own researches was subservient to his needs. William was the astronomer; Caroline his assistant. It was Caroline who sat at the bottom of the telescope recording William’s observations, a task that required speed and meticulous precision, as well as an advanced understanding of astronomical recording methods; it was Caroline who, while William did terribly important work on an astronomical catalogue and double stars and grown-up things like that, was given a smaller telescope and told to sweep the skies looking for comets; and it was Caroline who undertook, at William’s request, the monumental task of reappraising, cross-indexing, updating and correcting John Flamsteed’s Historia Coelestis Britannica, the pre-eminent star catalogue of the time.

In 1782 William was appointed ‘The King’s Astronomer’, and they moved, by royal request, to Datchet, where he could be on hand to show the king and his guests the wonders of the night sky. While Caroline’s role in this new venture was still secondary to William’s, she made her mark by discovering eight comets and fourteen nebulae, and in 1787 her efforts were rewarded when she became the first woman to be given an official government position (even if it was as assistant to her brother) and the first to receive a salary for work in astronomy.

Caroline lived to the age of ninety-seven, outliving William by twenty-six years, and moving back to Hanover after his death. Her astronomical efforts there were hampered by architecture – the tall buildings where she lived restricted her view of the night sky – but she spent most of her time helping her nephew John* with a catalogue of nebulae.

In 1828 she was awarded the Royal Astronomical Society’s Gold Medal. The next woman to achieve this was Vera Rubin in 1996. She was, by any measure, a remarkable and important scientist. Finding the crater on the moon named after her feels like the least I can do.

The shimmering reflection on the sea, in recent nights so pellucid, now has a subdued dullness to it, as if sapped of energy by the overbearing shadow of its mother planet. The shadow makes its slow way across the moon, the surface taking on an orangey shade, and soon the lunar-impact crater C. Herschel is swallowed by darkness.

If I think about it I can be thrilled by the knowledge that the shadow inching its way imperceptibly across the moon’s cratered surface is earth. That’s us, that is. Hello, Mum! But that requires a cognitive leap, albeit a small one. My reaction to the moon’s colour is visceral.

Knowing that the reddening of the moon during a partial eclipse is caused by the scattering of light through the earth’s atmosphere* is one thing; seeing it happen in close-up – the quarter of a million miles between us contracted by optical magic – is quite another. Knowledge can remove mystery – ‘oh, there’s quite a simple explanation for that’ – but it’s possible to be two things at the same time: on the one hand a modern human with a basic grasp of science and on the other a primitive staring in awe at a supernatural and inexplicable phenomenon.

The science itself is amazing; its effect doubles the wonder.

I’m aware, as I look, that I don’t have the right tools for the task. My scope, with its 20×–60× magnification, is great for differentiating a gadwall from a garganey at a hundred paces, but if I want a view of the wonders of the Andromeda galaxy, I’m going to need something a bit more high powered.

*

There are about twenty people in the classroom. A mixture of ages. On my left, two children – about eight and ten – sit with their mother, quiet with suppressed anticipation. The excitement of the group to my right, six men and women of my age or thereabouts, manifests itself as hearty banter, slightly louder than strictly necessary. A low buzz fills the wood-panelled room, expectations slightly undercut by the unspoken truth: we probably won’t get to see any stars.

Any pre-planned astronomy excursion is hostage to the prevailing weather conditions, and for a week I’ve been checking the local forecasts, using the time-honoured technique of working through all the weather sites until I find a forecast I like.

There are no forecasts I like. The conditions for the night of my visit to Kielder observatory are resolutely set to ‘thick cloud with an extra slice of cloud and a side order of cloud’.

They’re prepared for this at Kielder – they have to be – and the enthusiastic and knowledgeable team will deliver an evening of entertainment, whatever the conditions.

I will have a good time. I will learn loads of stuff that will no sooner enter my head than leave it again.

I will almost certainly not do any stargazing.

Kielder observatory sits high on a fell near the Scottish border. It’s in the International Dark Sky Park formed by Northumberland National Park and Kielder Forest & Water Park, one of the darkest places in Europe. The nearest A road is fifteen miles away. It is as remote as anywhere in the UK, and on a cold December night it feels like it. The approach road to the observatory, winding upwards through the forest, feels endless, lonely, and just a bit spooky. It’s the kind of road you drive up hoping you won’t break down, while your mind rehearses all the possible scenarios that might unfold if you did, most of them involving dangerous criminals of one kind or another.

As I get out of the car a chill wind ruffles my hair. By the observatory – a modern timber oblong with twin turrets to house the telescopes – a small wind turbine rotates frantically, emitting a soft, relentless, rhythmic wailing that only adds to the desolate feeling of the place. The constant light and bustle of south London feels a universe away.

The observatory’s primary remit is to put on events such as this one, explaining the mysteries of the universe to the general public and giving them a chance to use the observatory’s powerful sixteeninch telescopes to look at the infinite wonder of the night sky. The staff giving the talks are young, enthusiastic and communicative. Good humour runs through them like writing through a stick of rock.

‘Just a word about our composting toilet before we begin. Think of it as like a black hole – once something crosses that event horizon it’s not coming back.’

The plan for the evening is laid out. As expected, we’re in for an indoors kind of time, but we’re assured that at the first sign of clear skies we’ll be out of the classroom and looking through telescopes quicker than you can say ‘coronal mass ejection’. Hayden – genial and softly spoken, with a nice line in dry wit – tells us about the solar system. There are facts and numbers and sciencey titbits galore, pitched at just the right level to make you feel clever for knowing some of it already.

‘When we look at the sky, we’re looking back in time – just over a second in the case of the moon, eight minutes when it comes to the sun, and years when it comes to the other stars.’ He lets it sink in. ‘And the more you think about that, the more it messes with your head.’

These are statistics I more or less know, but have never quite come to terms with, so it’s wonderfully reassuring to hear this level of awe from someone who spends their whole time considering such things.

He talks about the sun and Mercury and Venus, and then works his way outwards, covering each of the planets and their individual quirks and characteristics in turn. Next to me the two children are agog, not moving a muscle. I glance across after twenty minutes or so and meet the mother’s eye. We exchange smiles.

And now Hayden broadens the scope, messes with our heads just a bit more.

‘Look up at the sky, and you’ll see stars. Our sun is just a star, one of 400 billion in the superstructure called the Milky Way galaxy. We think of it differently because it’s close to us, but all those stars have planets orbiting round them, just like ours. And beyond that, there are billions more galaxies.’ A short gap, and then he speaks more softly, so softly I nearly miss it, except you can’t miss it because there’s one of those silences you get only when a roomful of people is listening very closely.

‘And here’s the wonderful thing. We think of all that as “out there”, but of course we’re a part of it, and we’re all – you and me and everybody – made of the same stuff that makes up the universe. We’re all stardust.’

It’s the kind of thing, said by the wrong person in the wrong tone of voice, that might have me rolling my eyes. But this is a scientist, not expressing some woolly idea in poetic terms, but baldly stating a scientific fact with great enthusiasm and persuasiveness. This isn’t ‘ooh don’t you sometimes think the stars are God’s daisy chain?’ stuff; this is pragmatic and down to earth, yet it contains a profound truth.

We are all stardust.

It’s a thought both terrifying and comforting at the same time, so it’s probably just as well that we’re interrupted before it can take hold.

One of Hayden’s colleagues pops his head round the corner.

‘It’s clearing up.’

A little ripple runs round the room. For all that the talk has been entertaining, we’ve come here for the real thing. They split us into two groups and we file outside. I find myself on the fringes of Hearty Banter group as we go up the ramp and gather round the telescope. Set in eight metres of concrete for stability, it’s impressively large, as you’d hope, and has another, smaller scope bolted to its side. It’s controlled by a computer on the far side of the room. Such is the sophistication of the software, you just type in the name of the thing you want to look at, and the telescope does the rest, following the celestial object like Philip Marlowe on the trail of a hoodlum.

M – O – O – N.

The telescope moves smoothly round, pointing through the aperture in the roof that’s been opened just enough for the purpose. Naz, our guide for this part of the evening, has a little look through the eyepiece, then moves aside. We shuffle round to take our turn, everyone wanting to look and look and look, but too polite to hog it. There’s a strange mixture of reactions. One woman, channelling Ms YooHoo from the Skye eagle trip, gives an excited squeal.

‘Ooh, it’s ever so bright!’

This triggers a bout of excited joshing in her group. It dies down after a few seconds, to be replaced by a contemplative silence interrupted only by the shuffling of shoes on the floor and a quiet murmur.

It’s my turn. As I put my eye to the eyepiece, Naz tempers our excitement with a different perspective.

‘The moon’s a beautiful thing, of course, but the fuller it gets, the worse it is for looking at the rest of the sky. It reflects only about 4 per cent of the sun’s light, but that’s enough to mask quite a lot of the celestial objects around it. Some astronomers call it “the devil’s lightbulb”.’

Just at this moment, I don’t care about the rest of the sky. The moon is giving me plenty to look at. It was entrancing enough seen through my spotting scope; now, viewed through this comparative behemoth, it’s apparently close enough to touch, and utterly mesmerising, the effect of the silvery glow magnified, each pockmark vivid and real. I look at the craters on the narrow margin where dark meets light, the casting of the shadows rendering them truly three-dimensional. Then I yield unwillingly to the next in line and stand aside, looking up at the clearing night sky and thinking Big Thoughts.

We adjourn for hot drinks and milling. I find myself next to a middleaged man – ruddy of cheek, genial of tone – who offers his thoughts. They tally almost exactly with mine.

‘Makes you think, dunnit?’

It’s a simple, clichéd truth. It really does make you think.

We move outside again in small groups. Some go back in to the large telescopes, others opt for an examination of meteorite samples. I head for a viewing platform outside the observatory, where the staff have installed two portable telescopes, easy to manoeuvre so we can look at any part of the sky that takes our fancy.

In a triumph for the discipline of mind over matter, if not for the art of weather forecasting, the clouds have dispersed enough for us to see large swathes of sky. For a city dweller, used to obscene levels of light pollution, the darkness itself is a kind of miracle. Already, as my eyes adjust, I can see many more stars than on even the clearest London night.

Adam, who to my aged eyes looks as if he’s way past his bedtime, places himself at our disposal, asking us what we’d like to see. There are shrugs and doubtful looks, possibly because nobody wants to say the obvious. In the end I fling caution to one side. Who cares if I seem gauche?

‘Orion?’

He swings the telescope round and unerringly focuses on the three stars of Orion’s Belt, moving smoothly into a quick rundown of the most clearly visible stars that make up possibly the best-known constellation in the night sky. With the usual awe of the inexpert for the expert, I can’t believe his depth of knowledge, the speed and ease of the answers to any questions we throw at him, and the facility with which he handles the telescope, swinging it round to show us another constellation with speed and dexterity.

But mostly I can’t believe he’s wearing shorts.

It is not warm. I’m wearing a hat, thick gloves, long johns, woollen socks and four layers under my padded coat; he’s swanning around in a light fleece and track shorts as if he’s just off for a stroll down to the beach.

‘So, if you go up to the left from the belt at roughly ninety degrees, you can see Betelgeuse – Orion’s left shoulder. It’s often pronounced “bettle-guhze”, but then Brian Cox pronounced it “beetle juice” on the telly, so, you know . . .’ He shrugs. ‘It’s gone a bit dim recently, so some people think it might be about to go supernova, but bear in mind that it’s anywhere between 430 and 650 light years away, so it might already have happened and we’ll only just be seeing it from here. In any case, it’ll happen soon, by which of course I mean any time in the next hundred thousand years.’ He gives a quick smile, full of humour. His energy is infectious.

He angles the telescope low, as if about to fire a projectile across the ground into Kielder Water a few miles away.

‘Have a look at that.’

I have a look. Low in the sky, a star bright enough to be clearly visible with the naked eye. It twinkles like the eyes of a favourite uncle. In the telescope it looks like a miniature glitter ball, red and blue and green sparkles turning slowly around each other.

It looks alive.

‘That’s Sirius, the Dog Star. Famous star, very bright, the brightest star in the sky. It’s a binary star, which means it’s actually two stars, orbiting each other. But they’re close enough to each other that from here they look like one.’

‘How close is close?’

‘Depends. Between eight and thirty astronomical units, depending on where in the orbit cycle they are.’

They told us what an astronomical unit is. I’m expected to know. A short pause as I will the knowledge back into my head. Ah yes. The distance between us and the sun. Thirty astronomical units – thirty times ninety-three million miles – seems far, but they’re eight light years away, which is like a gazillion miles or something. Everything is relative.

‘It’s very low in the sky, so the twinkling you see is the scattering of the star’s light by the atmosphere, not the star itself.’ He turns to me as I step back from the telescope. ‘They call it the disco star.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really. It’s in all the astronomical textbooks.’

‘Oh. So not really then.’

‘No. But it would be good, wouldn’t it? Now, let’s have a look at the Plough.’

Swing, drop, focus.

We call it the Plough, Americans call it the Big Dipper, but I call it the Saucepan, because nobody knows what a plough looks like any more, but they do know what a saucepan looks like, and that, to me, is what it most resembles. When our ancestors named the constellations, they used things that were familiar to them, and the names varied across the world according to local experiences, beliefs and mythology. The night sky was an integral part of people’s lives. Not any more. We know lots of stuff they didn’t, of course, but that ordinary contact with the world around us has been eroded. In learning, we forget.

At my request, Adam takes us through the names of the Saucepan’s stars.

‘OK, so, from the end of the handle: Alkaid, Mizar, Alioth, Megrez, Phecda, Merak, Dubhe.’

I try to construct a mnemonic to help me remember. AMAMPMD, the initial letters of each star, doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. Using the first two letters is little better: Almialmephmedu. I decide to remain in a fog of ignorance for the moment.

‘How far away are they? I mean, they all look similar brightnesses. Does that mean they’re approximately the same distance?’

‘Well, sort of. They’re all between about 80 and 125 light years away. Dubhe is the furthest. Alkaid, at the tip of the handle, is about a hundred light years.’

‘So the light we’re seeing now left it a hundred years ago.’

‘It’s a bit more complicated than that, but basically, yes.’

I look up at Alkaid, its steady one-hundred-year-old light constant against the inky depths, and I can’t help the thought that pops into my head, that this light I’m seeing now was created, more or less, at the same time as my father was born.

The complexities of the space–time continuum mean this isn’t the whole truth – I’m dimly aware of that, but I failed physics ‘O’ level, so attempts to clarify it for me are doomed. Besides, I prefer the poetry of the thought to the wonder-diluting reality.

Adam, a human dynamo with cold-resistant legs, has swung the telescope round and is focusing on a different part of the sky.

‘Ah! There we go.’

He steps away, invites me to look.

‘What am I looking at?’

‘That diffuse cloud in the middle of your view. The Andromeda galaxy. It’s the Milky Way’s nearest neighbour. About 2.5 million light years from earth.’

And then it hits me. A kind of fatigue, born of over-exposure to bewildering numbers. Umpty-thrillion light years to this place; thrumpty-gazillion light years to that other place. If you laid all the football pitches and all the buses in Wales and Belgium next to Nelson’s column, you’d need zumpty-megadillion of them to walk to the moon.

I thank him, and wander away, tilting my head back and scanning the dark sky vaguely. I have had a good time. I have learned loads of stuff, and some of it even stayed in my head. And I did, against the odds and the weather forecasts, do some stargazing.

I sit on a bench and allow the night sky to infiltrate my being. After a while they gather us together and bring the evening to a close, and I drive home, trying to concentrate on the road and not the infinite sky above.

Another place, another telescope. A different kind. No lenses, no mirrors. You don’t squint through this one.

Jodrell Bank, in Cheshire. Set in thirty-five acres of entirely pleasing gardens and woods, and looking at the farthest reaches of the observable universe since 1945.

We walk round the Lovell Telescope, marvelling at the sheer beauty of the structure, the intricacy of its latticed metalwork, the impression it gives of being some sort of gut-churning fairground ride or an impossibly expensive scaled-up executive desktop toy, somehow both monumental and delicate at the same time.

It is a thing of great beauty. Had it been built purely for decoration I would still walk in its shadow with admiration – factor in its ability to register an alien fart in the Stingray Nebula and I’m solid gone.

Looking at stars through a reflecting telescope, seeing them with my own eyes, somehow gave me a thread of comprehension to cling to. I could see a tiny dot of light, so it must exist. And when the details were explained to me, I could at least pretend to understand while silently trying to picture a long series of noughts in my head and getting no further than ‘a very very long way away’. But at least it felt real.

It’s different with a radio telescope. This feels more like science fiction. I get that it’s paraboloid because it’s focusing the signal – it’s a concept I became familiar with in my childhood when trying to record the song of a blackbird by nestling a cheap microphone in the cosy embrace of a dustbin lid. But how they decipher the radio signals when they have them is, as it should be, beyond me. And as with anything space-related, the question most likely to burst from my lips is an exasperated, ‘But how do you know?’

And of course the answer always distils down to ‘Science, and a lot of hard work by very clever people.’

I’m distracted – oh so easily distracted – by jackdaws. They nest under the telescope, the many ledges and crannies afforded by the supporting structure ideal for their purposes. I watch them tumbling and chasing each other, and hear their familiar chackings, and I think, jackdaws I can deal with – they’re on a scale I understand.

And then we look at the other things the site has to offer, particularly enjoying the delicious playfulness of standing by a parabolic reflector and hearing my son whisper into its twin thirty yards away, his voice appearing in my head as if he were standing next to me – a well-established acoustical trick, but great fun to try out anyway.

And when we’re done with that, and feel like getting away from the milling throngs, we wander away from the telescope, through the grounds. I feel the warmth of the sun, and try hard not to think of it in terms of physics and maths, but merely to feel it as a pleasing sensation on my nape.

There is a bird hide in the woods. We sit for a while as blue tits and chaffinches come and go. There’s the occasional rustle and flurry in the undergrowth, but I don’t feel the need to dig out the binoculars and look for it. It isn’t one of those days. It’s a ‘wandering through the woods with your family, allowing the time to pass slowly and uneventfully, occasionally admiring a butterfly, and simply enjoying the warmth and the light and the general ooh-ness of things while quietly turning over the vastness of the universe and the mystery of existence in your head, but not worrying too much about it’ kind of day.

No doubt German has a word for it.

We stumble on a place. A clearing. A group of about twenty people, loosely gathered around what turns out to be a beekeeping demonstration. Information is imparted about the workings of a hive, the role of the queen and the workers and the drones and all sorts of fascinating stuff that I vaguely know already. I half focus on it, allowing the words to drift pleasantly into my head without feeling the need to retain the information. They quell incipient bee rebellion with a pleasant-smelling smoke, and gently warn us that sometimes bees might land on us. This is normal, they emphasise, and the main thing is not to panic, and above all not to flap, and certainly not to run, because that will cause the bee to emit a chemical summoning its colleagues to attack its attacker.

A bee lands on someone. They panic. They flap. They run. And while they do that, I think uncharitable thoughts about human intelligence and people’s inability to take the advice of experts. To calm myself down I take a slow walk away from the action and into a nearby clearing where there is nothing but a chiffchaff singing its repetitive song to accompany my thoughts.

This feels like an appropriate place to end my journey, started back on the mean streets of West Norwood and taking me from the kitchen sink to the cosmic void. There’s been wildlife galore – things I might never have dreamed of looking at if I’d stuck to my primary interest in all things avian. The spider in the sink, reminding me of the importance of not overlooking the apparently mundane; the Perfectly Normal Tree, harbouring invisible miracles; the lizard on the boardwalk, throwing me back to prehistory; the gorilla in the zoo, making me examine the ethics of our relationship with wild things; the beluga in the Thames, an alien life form visiting from far-off lands.

The places I’ve visited – working my way from the urban and domestic, through the rarefied atmosphere of museums, out through zoos and nature reserves to the wild and untamed – have yielded their treasures, whether in the dubious form of a sharp peck to the head from an Arctic tern or the more passive pleasures of a frosty, misty, jaunty-whistle-inducing morning above Selborne. And the people historically associated with those places – the great and the good – have been an inspiration. They all have something to offer – Darwin’s patience, White’s perception, Bewick’s eye, Lemon’s doggedness – and from them I’ve learned to slow down, to delve deeper, to seek out the unusual among the commonplace, to look, look again, look better. And by looking, I learn to see, to appreciate, to understand just a little more.

Wherever I’ve gone, people have played their part, whether fully absorbed by nature or indifferent to it, from beginners to experts and every stop between. Sometimes, it has to be admitted, they’ve done this by the simple expedient of being absent, allowing me the selfishness of communing silently with the natural world. But sometimes their contribution has been invaluable: the boy in thrall to the dolphins on the Farne Islands boat; Tattoo Guy, with his love of pigeons and his non-biting dog; Mike, indulging me with the whitethroat; and yes, even Ms YooHoo There’s the Eagle. Seeing their reactions, their relationships, their different ways of being in nature – from silent to noisy, mildly curious to thoroughly absorbed – has made me realise how widely people’s relationships with nature vary. For some, it is healing, an essential part of their daily struggle with the difficulties of existence; for others, merely a conduit to joy; for many people it’s an incidental thing, an occasional pleasure to be dipped into like a bedside anthology; and for yet more it is scary, alien, to be avoided at all costs.

But for all these differences, for all that there are as many relationships with nature as there are people, there is a kind of unity to it all. Because we are part of it, not separate from it. Weird as it might seem, all these magnificent creatures – from nematode worm to murderous jeeb – are our cousins, however distant. Darwin saw this. When he wrote about nature, he included us. We all came from the same ancestor, and we’ve all survived this far. We are all in this together. And the more we understand our family, the closer we get to it, the more likely we are to take care of it.

A movement catches my eye. A fluttering, scattery, apparently random movement, as of one not quite in control but going there anyway.

A common blue butterfly.

Through a gap in the trees I glimpse the telescope, quietly exploring the furthest reaches of the known universe. A stray bee buzzes around my head, then lopes off back to the hive, there to perform unfathomable miracles. And I think of it all, from bees to Betelgeuse – all made from the same stuff, repurposed stardust.

For a very long time we thought we were the centre of it. But enlightenment gradually dawned – more gradually to some than to others – and we know now, more or less, where we stand.

We are an impossibly tiny speck. And that’s fine. And if it scares the bejeezus out of some people, I happen to find it somehow reassuring. Because all these encounters – the butterfly on the flower, the eagle over the water, the light from a distant star and all the rest of it – represent the slotting-in of a tiny piece of our universe jigsaw. We’ll never come close to finishing it, but nonetheless we persevere, constructing our own little corner of it in the hope that one day we’ll be able to stand far enough away for some of it to make sense.

Look. Look again. Look better.

* I might not be representing it entirely accurately, which in a way proves my point.

^† Yes yes, I know – it was also in the interest of a rash promise their president had made a few years earlier, and in the interest of beating the commies to it, and in the interest of a technological race that was acting as a proxy for nuclear war, but apart from that . . .

^‡ The distance varies between 225,623 and 252,088 miles, depending on where the moon is in its orbit.

^§ It was surpassed by Apollo XIII, which swung round to the dark side of the moon the following year.

* A word much improved if you say it in the voice of the great Carl Sagan.

^† Having used it, I should probably explain what it means. It means ‘configured in a straight line’ when applied to three or more celestial bodies.

* Unlike Jupiter, with its frankly ostentatious total, at last count, of seventy-nine.

^† Compared with London, that is, which is admittedly a low bar.

^‡ I haven’t collated all the information, but he belongs to a strange subset of humans who have been exhumed twice. In his case the two exhumations, in 1901 and 2010, were to establish the circumstances of his death (most likely a burst bladder), but also to establish the material from which his artificial nose was made (brass, not gold as was believed during his lifetime).

* Obviously the moon rocket went a lot faster and didn’t stop for a Gregg’s at Leigh Delamere, but thinking about it like this makes it more manageable somehow.

* If it seems as if I’m an expert in lunar geography, rest assured I’m not. These are just the ones I know about and have looked up. The rest of it is a mystery awaiting exploration.

* Who, you’ll remember, invented cyanotypes all the way back on page 94.

* About 74 per cent nitrogen, 21 per cent oxygen, 1 per cent argon and then a whole load of other stuff including variable amounts of water vapour.