Welsh village turns off lights to stargaze with Tim Peake
The evening was still, peaceful and – thankfully – reasonably clear. As dusk fell in the Welsh hills the people of a tiny Pembrokeshire village called Star turned off their lights to help deepen the darkness and traipsed through the gloaming to a farmer’s field to meet a spaceman and gaze skywards with him.
“It’s pretty amazing,” said Catrin Davies, a teacher who had brought a group of children from the local school to stargaze with the British astronaut Maj Tim Peake.
“This is a small community. We’re not used to having real-life space heroes visiting. We have amazing night skies here but I don’t think we do look up and appreciate it enough. This makes you think.”
Peake was in Pembrokeshire to talk about what it was like to peer down at the world from the International Space Station – and to remind people to look up and wonder.
This corner of south-west Wales is one of the best dark sky spots in the UK but the idea was to persuade the people of Star (population: 21) to extinguish their lights for a couple of hours and discover what they could see in the heavens.
“People thought it was a wind-up when we first told them about it,” said the county councillor Rod Bowen as he waited in the field for the sun to set and the first visitors to arrive. “I think we’ve persuaded them that it’s real. I hope so – or it will be a lonely night.”
Bowen explained that the area was reasonably dark on a normal night. There used to be a pub and wool mill in the village, which is an hour’s drive from the bright lights of Swansea. Now there are just a few people, cattle and sheep.
Legend has it that the village was named after the sighting of a comet many centuries ago by a local minister. The spectacle inspired him to build a chapel on the hillside. “But nobody is really sure,” Bowen said. “It’s a nice story anyway.”
One of the first to arrive as the sun dipped was Richard Davies from the Preseli Astronomy Club, who lugged a one metre long telescope into the field (his smallest). He frowned as the clouds thickened over the Irish Sea. “To be honest you don’t get that many clear nights here. It can be clear all day and then the cloud arrives in the evening and you can’t see a thing.”
Happily this was not one such night. As it became gloomier, Davies pointed out the first stars – Vega, Altair, Deneb.
The crowd began to thicken. Children
arrived on a bus; couples and families gingerly picked their into a tent for a talk and slideshow from Peake.
The astronaut showed them his pictures of Earth taken from the 250 miles up in the space station – Patagonian ice fields, the pyramids, the gleaming lights of northern Europe.
One of Peake’s favourite photos shows Earth’s atmosphere looking like a halo. “That tiny strip of atmosphere 16km thick contains the air we need for life – the only known life in the universe,” he said. “It’s very special to think that’s all that keeps us alive.”
There were oohs and aahs as the astronaut showed them a photograph of Pembrokeshire at night taken from the space station. Compared with brightly lit England, much of Wales is wonderfully black at night.
By now it was very dark outside the tent. This event was not without a commercial angle. Google had put it together to promote its new Pixel 4 phone, which comes with a clever mode allowing it to take excellent images of the night sky. A row of the phones was set up on tripods to give people a chance to have a go.
It wasn’t quite Bible-black, to borrow a description from Dylan Thomas, whose grave is not far from here. A farmhouse across the valley clearly had not got the message and its lights burned brightly. An occasional car headlight flashed by.
But it was dark enough. A couple stole a kiss in the shadows; a child briefly wandered off but was quickly found; an elderly man tripped over a guy rope. And before the clouds rolled in, the stars briefly glistened.
Peake posed for pictures and was pleased with the event. “Anything that gets people outside connected with nature and looking up at the stars has to be good,” he said. “We lead such busy lives sometimes we forget to do that. Looking up at the stars has always filled me with a sense of awe and wonder.
“As a boy, I looked up and began to think of those big questions: where are we? What is our place in the universe? What’s it all about? Those questions don’t go away as you get older, the curiosity builds and builds. You don’t have to be an astronaut to go into space. All you have to do is to look up at the stars.”