Stars

I have always been fascinated by the stars. I remember when I was a kid in Windhoek in Namibia in the early 1960’s how I would sit on the fence in the corner of our yard and watch the sun go down. Like a big ball of fire it would slowly descend on the hills in the distance and the air would cool down rapidly, so rapidly that I could feel it on my cheeks. Then the stars would pop out of the dark blue hemisphere above me, like little lights being switched on one-by-one.
Linda would sit next to me and ask all sorts of questions. She was my neighbour and only friend at the time. I would know all the answers of course. My imagination ran wild as I extrapolated from bits of stories my dad told me. The stars were very far away. Some were balls of fire and some were places just like earth. We imagined what these places would look like, whether the people on those far-away specks in the sky were watching us as we were watching them. We fell silent as the Milky Way appeared slowly, glowing above us with a coldness of deep space that we could somehow feel, making us shiver. I was going to be a rocket man. I would build rockets that would take me to those places and I would come back, floating down by parachute and maybe I would have a present or two from those stars.
Today I can barely see the stars from where I stay in the city. We add more lights for safety, we add more lights for comfort and we dim our imaginations as we do so.
If you feel like exploring the stars right on your computer screen, surf over to the Open Source site of Stellarium and watch in wonder how your screen is transformed by the work of the people that are writing this fantastic piece of software. I wonder what happened to Linda...