Astronomy for beginners

I’ve just been out on the terrace watching the international space station go overhead. It was very exciting. It’s dead easy to see as NASA gives very simple to follow directions, for pretty much everywhere on earth, and it moves fast, so really, you couldn’t mistake it for anything else.

I was watching the live feed of the astronauts repairing the cooling system, and I thought then it must be possible to see it in the flesh, so to speak. Not that I expected the astronauts to wave or anything, but it is quite thrilling to think they are actually outside the craft.

My daughter says she has no desire at all to go into space, but I think it must be the most wonderful thing to see Earth from space. Far the best bit of the moonshots were the pictures of Earth from such a distance. It looks awfully little.

I was not as excited to see the space station as I was to see Halley’s comet. We went into the garden at our old house and watched it several nights. We didn’t wake the kids up, as it was visible very late at night, but now I think maybe we should have done. They’re not that likely to get another chance. We certainly won’t.

Better still – not as good as Earth from space, but really awe inspiring – was the transit of Venus. Projected on paper with the binoculars, the image of the sun was about the size of the palm of my hand. Moving across it was a small black full stop, which was Venus! You have to remember that Venus and Earth are pretty much the same size. So that is how small Earth is, and how big the sun is, and the sun is not a particularly big star. You get a kind of vertigo, just thinking about it.

Of course I’ve seen several partial eclipses of the sun, but I talked once to a bloke who had seen the total eclipse, in Cornwall. When it was possible to see a total eclipse in Britain, even if only on the tip of it, we were in the Canadian Rockies. Not great planning. Anyway, this chap was saying, that, although of course you know the earth is revolving at a thousand miles an hour, you don’t actually believe it, until you see the moon’s shadow hurtling towards you at this amazing speed. 

I’d like to see the Northern lights, and maybe sometime I will, but what would be much better – what I’d really like – is to see a total eclipse.