Wilko Looks to the Stars

The late great Wilko Johnson waxes lyrical on astronomy

In 2012, Wilko gave a lecture on his interest in astronomy at the Idler tent at the Port Eliot Festival. We published the talk as an essay in Idler 44: Mind Your Business….

I suppose it began with a tour of Australia with Ian Dury and the Blockheads. The flight out was a long one – an Arab gentleman died during the first leg of the journey and our plane was diverted from Abu Dhabi to Bahrain. They told us that fog had prevented a landing at Abu Dhabi (I believe they are often troubled by pea-soupers out there in the desert) but I saw this dead body wrapped in a British Airways blanket being shunted out of the luggage bay and driven off on one of those luggage vehicles – perhaps it’s a form of burial like the Tibetan Sky Burial where they take the corpse into the mountains, chop it up and leave it for the vultures to devour – only here they put you into the airline luggage system and you’re never seen again.

Anyway, what with one thing and another, this flight took a long, long time. To while away the hours many of us resorted to self medication of various kinds, and by the time we got to Melbourne we were thoroughly cured, not only that but severely jet-lagged too. I had never believed in jet-lag, but I experienced it then – and it’s great! If you could buy it I would definitely keep a stash for special occasions. There’s a speedy rush and you want to do everything at once – everybody’s walking up and down the hotel corridors in the middle of the night – then suddenly you feel this immense weariness, a lethargy that almost pushes you into the floor – you gotta lie down! But as soon as you do you get some more great ideas and you’ve got to go and tell somebody…

Thus it was that I was in the hotel bar explaining some stuff to the other guys when I realised that it was night time.

“Different stars!” I said and went flying off to the hotel roof. A swimming pool. I got one of those reclining chairs and lay back to witness this spectacle – and wow! The stars really were different! There seemed to be many more of them and lots of them were brightly coloured and furthermore these coloured ones were in motion – the whole sky was alive. Then I realised that I was seeing fireflies which were attracted by the swimming pool lights.

This was a bit of a disappointment but I continued with my observations and gazed up at constellations I had never before seen in the night sky. The edge was taken off this by the realisation that I didn’t know what the sky at home looked like. The only constellation I could ever identify was the Plough – which is of course not a constellation; it’s a shape made by the brightest stars in Ursa Major.

But anyway, I could see it wasn’t up there and that was the only difference I could see – I tried to find the Southern Cross but I couldn’t and by then the great tiredness was coming upon me, so I made my way back to the bar to report my findings.

And there Astronomy rested for some years.

My interest was rekindled by another trip to the antipodes. I had been booked to tour New Zealand with a rhythm and blues road-show – going out there on my own and working with NZ musicians. During the weeks before I was to go down there my thoughts turned once more to the southern night sky.

Not wishing to repeat the debacle of that first night in Melbourne, I decided to go this time armed with some knowledge. I didn’t however start learning to identify the constellations – no, I was preoccupied with this problem – is the Moon upside-down in New Zealand? It’s a difficult piece of reasoning and none of the books of Astronomy I consulted had anything whatsoever to say on the topic.

I thought and thought about it – sometimes I tried standing on my head to try and work it out but I couldn’t come to any firm conclusion. I would have to go and see.

This of course meant familiarising myself with the face of the Moon as it appears in our skies. I began to look at the Moon.

The Moon is an awesome and magnificent thing – not only is it woven deeply into the human psyche in myths and legends and beliefs but it is a tremendous object in itself – in fact it occurred to me that the Moon is the most familiar object in the universe. Every single human being who ever lived with eyes to see has gazed upon it – Pharaohs and cavemen, savages who worshipped it; the great intellects of Ancient Greece who tried to measure it; Newton, Einstein, everybody in this room. Everybody has stared and wondered at that thing… Future ages will gaze at it when we’re gone – weather permitting.

Anyway, by the time I set off for New Zealand I had a clear picture of the face of the Moon. When I arrived in Auckland it was the time of the new moon (which means the Moon is dark and not visible). Over the next couple of weeks it would be waxing into a full moon. In fact the skies were cloudy during this time and I didn’t get a glimpse.

These gigs we were playing were often in ballrooms attached to hotels. This is rather good because you can stay in your room right up until show-time and then pick up your guitar and walk across to the gig and afterwards, when you come off stage soaked in sweat, you are just minutes away from your luxuriously appointed bathroom.

You don’t even bother to take your guitar off – you just walk across to the hotel with it. You feel a bit silly if you pass anyone in the hotel corridor – walking along with a Fender guitar round your neck, it’s impossible to be casual. I mean – what a pose!

So one evening after a gig I am walking with my guitar across to the hotel. I turned a corner and there was the great shining disc of the full Moon. And it was upside down.

When I returned home, I continued to look at the night sky whenever I could. I learned to identify the planets. I knew that the bright object then in the south at midnight was Jupiter, and one night I took a pair of very cheap binoculars belonging to my young son and pointed them at the planet. Oh! I could see a tiny but distinct orange disc and strung out on either side of it were four pinpoints of light that were orbiting moons.

To see by such simple means another round world with its attendant satellites was a revelation; what emotions must have gripped Galileo when he witnessed this very sight and understood that it meant that the Earth was not the centre of all things – that these tiny lights would shatter mankind’s universe?

I bought a good pair of binoculars and looked at Jupiter every clear night – the four Galilean moons orbit the planet quite rapidly and appear in constantly changing formations – sometimes one or other of the moons would be invisible, eclipsed behind Jupiter, sometimes all four would be shining brightly, strung out like beads on either side of the orange Jovian disc.

Of course I also looked at the Moon discerning the crinkly mountain ranges and craters. My binoculars even showed me that the bright planet Venus goes through phases from crescent to full like the Moon. I would see many more things through these binoculars but they could not show me the wonder of wonders that I wanted most of all to see – the rings of Saturn.

At the millennium time we moved to a house with a garden which gave access to a larger area of the sky and computer-driven telescopes became available – their electric motors can exactly track objects as they travel from their rising in the east to their setting in the west and computers can point the telescope with a whirring robotic action at any target at the touch of a button.

My first telescope was a small five-inch one (this denotes the diameter of the concave mirror used by such “reflector” telescopes – ’scopes using glass lenses are called refractors). It was easy to carry the telescope in one hand and the tripod in the other out to the garden when darkness fell.

After the telescope was assembled and switched on it would automatically begin to take its bearings and point at a bright star – this would then be centred manually and its position entered – once two stars had been located in this way the computer could extrapolate the position of any object in the sky.

This alignment procedure, although necessary, carried its own dangers… I try to live a quiet life, attracting no particular attention from my neighbours, my paranoia convincing me that they watch me night and day so I try to keep cool. But when the telescope was lining up it would always pick a star that was hidden behind a leaf or branch. Now there is a procedure for dealing with this but I used my own methods – I would physically remove the offending leaf or branch. As you can imagine this involved a fair amount of leaping and grasping and I could not help but wonder what the insomniac neighbour staring out of her window at 3am would have made of this.

Anyway, at this time Saturn was rising just before dawn – a bright star over the housetops. I decided to wait for a couple of weeks until Saturn was higher in a dark sky before taking my first look… But one morning I was just packing up for the night when I saw that star rising. The batteries of my telescope had run down so the computer could not be used to find the planet. Looking through the eyepiece I made a couple of random sweeps.

Suddenly it flashed across the field of vision – less than a second it was in my view but it was Saturn; Saturn perfect, the image tiny but sharp and clear, tilting to show the unmistakable rings. In that brief moment all my expectations of the planet were fulfilled and the kick of that first glimpse stays with me.

In time I would have larger telescopes which show the division in the rings and their shadow on the pale surface of the planet. I would gaze on this view for hours sometimes, telling myself, “That thing exists – it’s really there.” If you were told to create something beautiful from two basic geometric shapes, who could have conceived of such a thing? Yet there it hangs in the night sky; impossibly beautiful and at the same time… obvious.

My little telescope developed a fault after a while and the shop said they couldn’t fix it and would give me my money back. I was having none of this and asked what was the next step up towards a real grown-up telescope.

And so it was that I took possession of a twelve-inch Meade lx200. This was big and it was heavy – there was no chance of carrying it back and forth from the garden – in fact the instruction manual contains the following advice: “Two or more people should always be used to move the telescope. Disregard of the above warning could result in serious injury or death.”

Grim pictures of my friends finding me one morning beneath the telescope like a squashed hedgehog.

But my house has a flat roof! What else was there to do but haul the thing aloft? I made sure there were plenty of helpers and we all survived.

The best plan with a large telescope is to set the thing up and then leave it permanently in place – this avoids the necessity of aligning it every time. It also means that the telescope must be protected from the elements.

I kept it covered with tarpaulins for a while, but this was not very neat or reliable. Eventually I made a fitted cover for it using tarpaulin and plenty of gaffer tape. This cover took the form of a six-foot high green condom, flared at the base to accommodate the tripod.

When darkness fell I would emerge from my trapdoor, pull off the cover and there was my telescope ready to go. There was a problem when I had finished – it was impossible to reach up and simply put this long condom over the telescope, and I adopted the method of getting inside the thing, putting it over the ’scope, then crouching down and crawling out from underneath.

This was awkward, and on frosty nights when the cover was frozen stiff, something of an ordeal. My paranoia also gave rise to fears that those same neighbours who had observed my antics pulling leaves off trees would look out of their windows and see a six-foot tall green alien stumbling about on my roof before engulfing the telescope.

Eventually I decided to house my (now massive 14-inch) telescope in a dome. This dome is made of fibreglass, delivered in pre-fabricated sections. It consists of a circular wall with a domed roof that turns on a roller track. I built the cylindrical lower section myself, but needed assistance to lift the revolving dome into place.

For some days I would go up to the roof and stand inside the topless dome like a child in a playpen. Still wishing for complete discretion, I decided to thwart the curiosity of my neighbours and complete the construction under cover of darkness. That way, the dome would appear one morning without commotion and hopefully pass unnoticed.

Round about this time I took up cycling and at first I practised riding around at three or four o’clock in the morning when the streets were deserted. On one of these early expeditions I rode up the street that runs parallel to mine. There is a gap between two houses on this street where you can look through to the back of my house and I wanted to see how conspicuous my dome was.

I rode slowly along looking for the place – “This is it – no, the next one…” By the time I found the spot I was riding very slowly – I saw the dome – it was huge and shining white in the darkness – my astonishment was interrupted by the realization that I had slowed down too much and was actually going to fall off. It’s really hard to fall off a bike without making a noise – basically you’ve just got to fall without flailing about and so I did – in slow motion I toppled – the side of my face made contact with terra firma and somehow seemed to keep on falling so that my cheek was ground into the pavement. I made not a sound.

I got up and I looked around and found that once again I had escaped unobserved, but at any moment one of those inquisitive neighbours could look out and my credibility would be damaged beyond repair. I got to my feet and gathered up my bike and the scattered groceries. I was in some considerable pain – in fact I believe I was actually whimpering as I dragged myself indoors – I lay on the floor for some time before realizing that I had forgotten to buy the Rizlas.

My current telescope is a 14-inch reflector – as well as the onboard go-to computer, it is equipped with sat-nav to determine its exact location and time. The images it produces are quite strikingly clear even though I live in a very light-polluted town. Images of the Moon are splendid – the best time to look at the Moon is when it is a crescent – then the features on the Moon’s surface, craters, mountains and so on, cast long shadows and appear really three-dimensional. With a full moon, the sun is shining directly down on the Moon – it is noon on the Moon – and there are no shadows so it appears quite flat like a sepia photograph.

But when the conditions are right, panning the telescope across the Moon is like flying over it – you get to know different localities and fantastic landscapes can be seen in great detail.

Other planets also show observable detail – you can see the frozen ice caps white on the red planet Mars, the red coloured stripes and Great Red Spot of Jupiter, and of course the rings of Saturn. It’s difficult to drag your eyes away from Saturn; but it’s not always in the sky.

You can turn your attention to more distant objects such as nebulae. These dim and hazy objects are either dust clouds in our own Milky Way galaxy or are themselves galaxies – congregations of billions of stars, each flying apart from one another as the Universe expands, separated by unimaginable gulfs of empty space. When you look at them you are looking deep into the past, because the light forming the image you see may have taken millions of years to reach us here on Earth.

The famous Andromeda galaxy (the most distant object that can be seen with the naked eye) – is two million light years away. What you are seeing is M31 (Andromeda Galaxy) as it was two million years ago, and of course the people up there are looking two million years into the past when they look at us – a world before the rise of humanity: their descendants will be seeing us in two million years, by which time we’ll be gone.

Of course they can’t really see us (no matter how many eyes they’ve got) but I’m convinced the galaxy – and the Universe – is full of worlds inhabited by intelligent beings. The terrible thing is we can never know each other: “HELLO THERE, HOW ARE YOU?”…two million years go by …”ALL RIGHT, HOW’S YOURSELF?”…another two million years pass before we hear that reply; civilisations have risen and fallen in the time it takes just to be civil.

This problem of space and time also renders the whole idea of extra-terrestrial visitors arriving here in their flying saucers to spend ten minutes freaking out some farmer in Kansas unfeasible if not downright risible.

Having said that, I must admit to having had occasional Close Encounters of my own… For instance, Telescope House (my favourite supplier of Astronomical hardware, an old-established and respected institution) has a subtle strangeness… Once I was visiting their premises in the heart of the Kent countryside when I asked to try some binoculars – I had some difficulty getting the images to coalesce. (Why is it that whenever somebody in a movie looks through binoculars, even in this twenty-first century, we are immediately and without fail presented with a point-of-view shot through a horizontal figure of eight shape – have binoculars never arrived in Hollywood? Has nobody there ever dared to tell the FX people that, with the possible exception of The Lone Ranger, nobody looks out on the world in this crude double-barrelled manner?)

Anyway, the boffin soon put things right by setting the eyepieces at the correct distance apart for my eyes: this led to reminiscences of a customer who had been unable to obtain suitable binoculars because his eyes were much too far apart. Plainly a Neptunian.

Now if the cosmos contains large numbers of intelligent life forms, given the billions of planets where such evolution is possible, then some of them must be of a higher order of intelligence than human beings – but just how clever can you get? The human race is the cleverest species on this planet and here and there and from time to time it produces individuals like Leonardo, Shakespeare, Newton and Einstein.

These people, much more clever than the average, are nevertheless perfectly normal human beings in every other respect – from this we can postulate a planet where the average individual possesses intellectual powers that equal those of Earthly geniuses, and of course the clever bastards there would be clever indeed, although pitiful dunces compared to the denizens of yet a third planet.

And so it goes on, this line of reasoning, until it brings us to Cleverness Central where civilization, the arts and sciences have been brought to such a pitch of perfection that it’s a shame we will never know anything about it.

Meanwhile back on Earth, my dome has more than paid for itself, by keeping my telescope safe from wind and weather and ready at a moment’s notice to lock on to any object in the night sky – sometimes, when clouds are drifting overhead, I take a rest from the telescope and look out over the sleeping rooftops of the neighbourhood – but I don’t see an Essex suburb, I see a small community of survivors from a spaceship disaster in some uncharted region of the galaxy where it is my duty to watch night after night for signs of the rescue ships.

I have recently wallpapered the interior of my nocturnal watchtower – a heavy maroon paper embossed with a floral pattern. It’s like being in a yurt, and when rain is beating down on the sealed roof, it’s a good place to be – especially if you’ve got some biscuits

Our November/December issue is available in bookshops as well as Waitrose, WHSmiths, Booth’s and Easons.