It's funny how, as we gaze up at the moon in an inky night sky, the knowledge that its face looks down on others elsewhere on the planet tends to make us feel we have contact, one with another, using it like a periscope. I wrote this after an astronomy lecture a couple of weeks' ago, but spoke to Gene Williamson briefly earlier this evening as he continues to make recovery from a period of illness. He wanted me to let you know just how much he loves and misses this place, and all of his friends here. Gene, we wish you well and much continued good progress. We look forward greatly to having you back here amongst us just as soon as you can possibly make it! :)) xx

CONSULTING THE STARS


I don’t know what I expected, sat in the tight-fisted dark of the sealed Planetarium. It was equally pitch-black outside, blindfolding the telescope’s all-seeing eye, so we looked at Hubble library images instead: the M16 Eagle Nebula’s Pillars of Creation; the dust-band round the nucleus of Black Eye Galaxy M64. Trying to assimilate some dizzifying facts, I was still pretty clueless: if light travels at a speed that’s seven times round the earth per second, how come, in all those pictures, there wasn’t one of you gazing up and grinning; shielding your eyes and waving madly from some speck in the Indian Ocean when your cratered, lunar features brighten distant columns of cloud that shadow my Jurassic coastline each day?