I grew up in a very rustic place, in the countryside, and when I think about the night sky, I sometimes wonder whether children today will ever have quite the same relationship with darkness that we did.
I was an 80s kid. There were no mobile phones, no tablets, no YouTube, no streaming services waiting to fill every moment of silence. Even television was something of a luxury, and when the power went out, which it did rather frequently during those long summer evenings, there wasn’t much left to do.
So we looked at the sky.
We would lie on a cot or a bed outside the house, or sometimes simply sit somewhere in the open, and look upwards. That was entertainment. That was how you passed an evening. The darkness wasn’t something that needed to be conquered. It was simply there, and the sky opened itself above us.
The stars seemed impossibly numerous.
I remember trying to count them, although counting all the stars was obviously an absurd undertaking. So we would claim a small patch of the sky for ourselves and attempt to count whatever we could see inside it. Our boundaries were wonderfully arbitrary. Sometimes the patch was framed by the leaves of a coconut tree. Sometimes it was simply the portion of sky visible through a window. Sometimes, if I had my spectacles on, I would almost use the frame of my spectacles as the boundary of my little universe.
That tiny rectangle or irregular patch became our territory.
We would stare at it and count.
Every now and then something would move.
Of course, we didn’t know what we were seeing. We had not yet acquired the vocabulary for everything that crossed the night sky. A star was a star, and if something appeared to move, it was easy enough to assume that perhaps stars moved too. Sometimes what we saw may have been a meteor. Sometimes it may have been a satellite. Much later, I would learn about the International Space Station and the astonishing fact that something built by human beings could quietly pass overhead, looking from the ground like another point of light making its way across the heavens.
At the time, though, the sky was full of mysteries.
I think that was where my fascination with astronomy really began.
And then came the questions.
I could never quite understand how the Earth could be round when everything around me was flat. I looked around and saw fields, roads, houses and trees. The ground stretched out in every direction and appeared perfectly level. Somebody was telling me that I was standing on a gigantic sphere, and my childhood mind could not reconcile that with what my eyes were telling me.
Then there was the business of the Earth spinning.
How could the Earth be spinning and we remain standing?
Why weren’t we thrown off?
And, more importantly, if the Earth was spinning all the time, why wasn’t my head spinning?
These seemed perfectly reasonable questions to me.
Fortunately, I had a father who never treated my questions as foolish. He was a teacher and a biologist, and he had an almost inexhaustible supply of patience and forbearance for my attempts to understand the world. He fed my inquisitiveness rather than trying to quiet it. If I asked something ridiculous, he would explain it. If I asked another question because the explanation created three more questions, he would explain those too.
That probably mattered more than I realised at the time.
We had toy binoculars, as I suspect many children of my generation did. Looking back, they were probably the first optical instruments I ever trained on the sky. They were hardly sophisticated. They certainly weren’t going to reveal the details of Jupiter. But that didn’t matter. There was something magical about holding an optical device to your eyes and pointing it upwards, as though you had suddenly acquired a licence to investigate the universe.
I kept looking.
The fascination stayed with me for a surprisingly long time.
In fact, it never really went away.
Even now, I find myself trying to recreate some version of that childhood experience. I have made attempts to track lunar eclipses. I have tried taking time lapse videos of the night sky and watching the movement of the stars across the frame. I have pointed my 10×50 binoculars at the sky. I have pointed my 8×40 binoculars at the sky. I have stood around waiting for something interesting to happen.
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
And I love both possibilities.
There is something deeply satisfying about simply waiting for the sky to reveal itself.
I wouldn’t claim that I have had crystal clear views of distant planets or spent my evenings making serious astronomical observations. I am very much an enthusiastic amateur. But the aspiration is still there.
One day, I want a proper telescope.
Not a little decorative telescope that looks good on a shelf, but a genuinely capable instrument, something serious enough to reward patience and curiosity. I want to be able to sit down and properly observe the Moon. I want to see Venus as something more than an exceptionally bright point of light, perhaps catch its phases. I want to watch Jupiter and its moons, see its cloud bands, and know that those tiny points beside it are worlds in their own right. I want to see Saturn and its rings with enough clarity that the thing I have known about since childhood suddenly becomes something I can actually see with my own eyes.
My ideal evening is remarkably simple.
A good telescope beside a window.
A few books somewhere within reach.
A notebook.
My shortwave radio murmuring quietly in the background, pulling voices and signals out of the invisible ether while the telescope pulls light out of the darkness.
The sky outside.
Venus in the evening.
Jupiter somewhere above the horizon.
Perhaps Saturn if the season and the hour are kind.
And beside me, a notebook in which I record what I see.
As a child, I used to claim a little patch of sky bounded by a coconut leaf or the frame of my spectacles and try to count the stars inside it.
I still do something similar.
Only now I have binoculars.
I have better questions.
I have a little more understanding of what I am looking at.
And, hopefully, one day, I will have a telescope.
But I think some part of me will always be that little boy lying down during a power cut, staring upwards and wondering how the Earth could possibly be round when everything he could see was flat.
That boy didn’t know about orbital mechanics, satellites, light years or planetary phases.
He just knew that the sky was enormous.
And that there were far too many stars to count.
Those were the days.
And perhaps that is why I still look up.
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