By Jupiter, I'm seeing planets, not stars

Local astronomer Douglas Daniels and I can only lament the light pollution and our rotten summer. august is supposed to be when our skies are the clearest. We could be enjoying the meteor shower caused by the passing of the comet Swift-Tuttle - if it weren't for these clouds.

But as Doug puffs his pipe and tries to explain einsteinian relativity, a bank of clouds lifts and a celestial body glimmers into view. "Oh, look," I say, "there is one star out tonight."

Doug looks up. "That's no star ... that's Jupiter! Quick, to the telescope!" and we scramble back into the observatory, where I am afforded a 500x magnification of the solar system's mightiest planet.

I am transfixed. I can discern the dust clouds that surround the gas giant, see its slightly squashed poles - caused by centrifugal force, for though Jupiter is 1,317 times the volume of earth, its day is a mere 10 hours long. Most amazingly, the four Galilean moons - volcanic Io, icy europa, giant Ganymede and lonely, distant Callisto - are as clear as day. and then cloud envelops our own planet again and all is extinguished.

The observatory truly is a London gem. The telescope is a "six-inch Cooke refracting" model, reasonably hi-tech, but its home still has the cosiness of a hobbyist's shed. It belongs to the Hampstead Scientific Society, founded in 1899 during that great late-Victorian age of gentlemanly enquiry. enchanting to think of Doug (a bit of a gem himself) smoking in the adjoining room, comparing slides with fellow scientists on dark nights.

The observatory is open to the public for the partial lunar eclipse this Saturday. You can use the telescope for free. Outside summer time, on clear Friday and Saturday nights, it is open 8pm-10pm. Doug noted sadly the thin trickle of schoolchildren who come. Surely outer space transcends generational differences? apparently not.

Sadly, I was not thinking of Stargate but of the ending to Mikhail Bulgakov's war novel, The White Guard: "everything passes away - suffering, pain, blood, hunger and pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes towards the stars? Why?"