It’s the warm room of my roll-off roof observatory, though "warm" is perhaps an optimistic description. I was painting primer on to bare wooden panels - the first step in what I grandly call "interior design", but which mainly involves trying not to spill Resene’s finest on my thermals.
After a long day and several mugs of tea, the sky cleared. A bright first-quarter Moon hung in the north, but the air was crisp and dry - the sort of bone-chilling transparency that makes astronomers reach for a telescope, even while their better judgement (and frozen toes) protest.
It dropped to -9°C. The warm room stayed cold. I wondered, not for the first time, if this hobby is a mild form of madness.
Still, the Helix Nebula called to me from Aquarius. Six hundred and fifty light years away, it’s the ghost of a once-bright star, casting off its outer layers in a final act of cosmic theatre. Early astronomers, peering through their primitive lenses, thought it looked like a planet - hence the name "planetary nebula." But we now know better. The Helix is a stellar corpse, beautiful and strange, its glowing gases drifting out into the dark.
That night, as I stared at the Helix’s faint rings, I thought about endings. And beginnings.
Earlier in the week, I learned I was going to be a grandfather for the first time.
The thought hit me with the same quiet force as a star dying 650 years ago, its light only just reaching Earth. There’s something about astronomy that makes you consider the long view - time stretching out in all directions, life flickering into being, burning bright, then fading into something new.
As the poet Mary Oliver wrote, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
Maybe, on a cold night in Middlemarch, the answer is: observe, wonder, and paint another coat of primer in the morning.
