Space scientist Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock shares her lifelong fascination with the night sky and explains how easy it is to get into stargazing
Next time you notice it’s a clear bright night, wherever you are – in a city or in the countryside – step outside if you can or just get to a window and look up for a few minutes.
The view will help put you at peace, and you’ll be following in a long tradition that probably spans back to a time before we could communicate with words, but when we could still share the wonder and majesty of the cosmos.
Looking up at the stars has been a constant quest in my life. Someone once commented that even when trying on a VR headset to enter a virtual world, the first thing I do is look up, as if I am viewing the stars.
I spent my teenage years growing up in a council flat in London, but that did not deter me from looking up whenever I got the opportunity. In one of the places we lived, I would run to the upper floors of the building, where I could look out across the iconic London skyline.
I remember one particularly clear night, I ventured outside for a better view. I stood between the blocks of flats to look up and take in the awe-inspiring vista. Starting to feel cold, I turned to go back inside… only to realise that the door had shut behind me, locking me out.
It was 3am, I was standing outside in my nightdress and now I was anticipating the wrath of my father when I tried to explain why I had woken him up at such an ungodly hour to let me back in, and why I was half-dressed and standing out in the cold. Luckily, a door to another level of the flats had been left open, so I sneaked back into bed with Dad none the wiser and drifted off to sleep with a contented smile on my face.
Since then, I have experienced the joy of working at and visiting some of the largest telescopes in the world. They are generally built in locations atop mountains that give the clearest possible views of the universe.
One of the great joys I currently experience is speaking to schoolchildren of all ages. When I first started doing this, I pondered on the hook that would get a four-year-old excited about space. The answer came to me like a gift:
Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are…
We learn this rhyme as children without really thinking about it, but ‘wonder’ truly is the right word to describe the sky on a clear night, with its thousands of stars glimmering bright in the vast blackness of space. Through the ages, this awesome spectacle has inspired great art as well as scientific inquiry. It has shaped civilisations.
DISCOVERING THE NIGHT SKY
Look up – that’s the first thing. We often take the stars for granted as we go about our lives down on
