The Moon and the stars aren’t painted on the sky
Instead, the view is out into the void, and it is both thrilling and appalling
Our sky — as we see it from the surface of Earth — is a dome arching over our landscape, enclosing everything below it as it curves across from one horizon to the other.
By day, we live within a blue cocoon, trimmed with white and grey, a result of the atmospheric scattering of shorter wavelengths of sunlight. The effect is beautiful, with the shade of blue directly overhead very vivid yet soft. This colour seems almost to exist for the purpose of energising and calming us, as we go about our lives underneath. When night comes, our blue roof is replaced by a dark one, sprinkled across with shining stars and with the small pale disk of the Moon floating among them.
But this familiar sky of our home is only an illusion.
Once the Sun’s light drops behind the horizon and the blue veil evaporates away, our view becomes one out of a wide open window — we stare out through the universe and all the things it contains, away across to an infinite horizon.
Looking through a gulf of vacuum we watch the Moon in its orbit, another world flying around ours through the blackness of space. Beyond the Moon we see past the multi-coloured planets of…
