The spacious firmament on high

This is the most dazzling era in astronomy that human history has ever known, but for all the attention it commands it could be the dullest. It seems almost routine, a swiftly forgotten news item at best, to see images of Mars beamed back from the planet’s surface or to have a comet’s content analysed by fragmenting its surface with a rocket. The astonishing construction of a space station circling the earth is of such little interest, it is wholly obscured by anxieties about the Shuttle that serves it. The seven-year, 2.2-billion-mile, inch-perfect flight of the Cassini spacecraft to examine Saturn’s moons registers only slightly more than the discovery this summer of 30 million new stars in the Milky Way by the Spitzer infra-red space telescope. Compared with what came before, these are the achievements of giants standing on the shoulders of pygmies, but they hardly play outside geekdom.

Anyone, therefore, who can awaken a wider sense of the wonder that such knowledge should create is to be applauded.