Most people have never seen the Milky Way. Not because it is hiding — on a clear night, far enough from city light pollution, it stretches across the sky in a dense, luminous band that stops conversation — but because the conditions required to witness it have become increasingly rare in an urbanised world. Light pollution now affects more than eighty per cent of the global population, and for a growing number of people, the night sky is simply a dark ceiling punctuated by a handful of the brightest stars. The universe has not retreated. We have simply stopped looking.

Amateur astronomy — the practice of observing the night sky with nothing more than eyes, patience, and a decent star map — requires no expensive equipment and almost no prior knowledge. What it requires is the willingness to step outside on a clear night and allow the eyes twenty minutes to adjust to darkness, which is all the human visual system needs to begin detecting objects invisible in casual glancing. Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy, is visible to the naked eye from a reasonably dark site. So are the Pleiades, the Orion Nebula’s glow, and on occasions, the slow steady drift of a satellite crossing the sky.

There is something that happens to a person who develops the habit of looking up. The scale of things becomes briefly, usefully apparent. The concerns of the day do not vanish — but they become easier to hold at the correct proportion. Astronomers who work with the largest instruments in the world report the same disorienting wonder as the child who first notices that the bright dot they had assumed was a star is, in fact, still moving.