TYCHO BRAHE

In 1572, Tycho Brahe looked up at the night sky and saw something odd. He lived in a time when people believed that the stars were fixed points of light, rotating like pinholes in giant invisible rolling spheres beyond the moon and the wandering planets.

While I've never quite known how to pronounce his name, I quite like Tycho Brahe. He was Danish, impossibly wealthy, prone to the odd duel with a sword and he looked rather like a walrus. He was a meticulous observer of the stars and he even had his own island observatory in the middle of a lake. Most scientists and engineers I know would love that.

What he saw in 1572 was a brand new star. We call them supernovas now, but he just called it the nova stella ('new star') when he wrote about it in 1573.  It must have been incredible: some say, when it first exploded into life, the supernova was so bright you could see it during the daylight hours. It's still there but it's now called SN-1572 if you want to look it up. It's in Cassiopeia.

I mention it today because the Intrepids (my parents) have been going on about Comet ISON - the latest astronomical spectacle.

I love standing and looking at the stars. There's something about the silence, the distance, the permanence and the promise that they hold. When you see them, you're looking at the furthest things you will probably ever lay eyes upon. Photons have streamed from those tiny points of light for millions of years, bursting out of the fiery hearts of gigantic nuclear reactors, speeding through the vast empty chasm of space towards you and only you, for this exact moment. I think there's something quite awesome about that.

Today was another one of those rare opportunities when something big and astronomical was supposed to happen. The comet, two kilometres wide and rather like an enormous snowball, has been hurtling towards the sun on its long, long orbit. There were two possible outcomes for Comet ISON: one, that it would spin around the sun and be flung back out into space in a spectacular light show we'd all enjoy for weeks... or two, that it would break up miserably as the colossal heat melted its icy core like an ice-cube at a bonfire party.

Guess what happened.

I'd have loved to have seen something spectacular like that. There's always clouds though. Whenever there's a lunar eclipse? Raining. Whenever the Earth passes through a meteor belt? In rolls the fog. Whenever there's a spectacular comet on the horizon? Smashed into the sun.

Also, unlike Tycho, we live in a world where most of the sky seems to be illuminated by other people. He wouldn't have coped with 21st-Century England. Though we'd have made him a better prosthetic nose perhaps.

-

I don't think life should be disappointing. I read an article last week about happiness being the difference between your reality and your expectation. If the reality was greater than the expectation, you could be defined as happy, I suppose. Disappointment awaited those whose expectations outweighed their reality. I don't think it's that simple, but I do understand that sometimes life promises you brilliant comets that stream past your window... and then gives you nothing but a disintegrated lump of old ice.

I believe you can surpass your expectation in so many surprising ways. I believe life should be interspersed with moments that take your breath away, with wonder-ful, awe-inspiring views of oceans and sunsets and mountains and galaxies and planets, with people who are so beautiful in every way, that they just make you feel alive when you're around them.

Like the fated comet, we don't have a lot of time on our journey through the solar system. We can make it spectacular by doing just a few small simple things - like course corrections if you will: little acts of fun, kindness, goodness and unexpected generosity. I'd like to be the kind of person who knows how to do that - to make life so excellent for other people, to so enjoy the journey that it's kind of infectious, and to light up the night sky along the way.