SEEING STARS... AND SO MUCH MORE

LOOKING TO THE SKIES FOR ANSWERS TO THE BIG QUESTIONS CAN BE A LIFE-AFFIRMING EXPERIENCE. BUT IT ISN’T ALL JUST STARGAZING — SOME OF THE PLANET’S BEST DARK-SKY DESTINATIONS OFFER ACTIVITIES AND EXPERIENCES THAT BRING THE COSMOS TO LIFE, MAKING EVEN THE MOST DISTANT NEBULAS SEEM CLOSER TO HOME

- BEN LERWILL

Somewhere in the cosmic void between Mars and Jupiter, around 111 million miles from Earth, there floats a hulking, rocky lump named Vesta. It’s one of the largest bodies in the asteroid belt, with a surface area the size of a small moon and temperatures that drop to -200C. Back down on Earth, it’s 2 am, I’m in a warm room on a dark hilltop in Northumberland, and a sliced fragment of Vesta is resting in my palm.

“I love space rocks,” says Ellie Macdonald, one of the science communicators at Kielder Observatory, encouraging me to study the interplanetary interloper under a microscope. “They’re the most tangible form of astronomy.” On the table around us are other long-distance travelers — little chunks of the lunar surface, and even Mars — all of which have arrived here in meteorite form. They represent not so much a collection of high-value rocks as a kind of solar system reunion.

A few minutes later, we’re standing outside, where the dead-of-night clouds have rolled back to reveal a shimmering, psychedelic universe of pinprick stars. Directly above us is the unfathomable vastness of the Milky Way, a glowing cosmic highway furled across the night sky. Ellie’s colleague, Liam Reid, gives the sight some context. “So, our sun is one of 300 billion stars,” he says, as my mind does loop-the-loops. “And that’s just in our galaxy alone. There are three trillion other galaxies.”