Star-gazing: how astronomy can change your life

I was living in Iceland as my life derailed — a crisis about which I have written here. Star-gazing, and the sense of wonder if brings, brought me back to myself – and the benefits of astronomy for mental health are now being more fully explored. But let me begin at the beginning.

I’m the only non-scientist in a family of scientists. (This is perhaps no longer strictly true, as I commence — two decades after I first went to university— my first science degree, a BSc in Planetary Sciences and Astronomy.) An elderly relative would come round to our house, when my sisters and I were growing up in the 1990s, bringing with him his telescope from his days at University College London, and we’d watch a wobbly, unsure Saturn, taking it in turns to press our eye against the lens as we shivered in the dark.

As a teenager, I was more drawn to human interpersonal dynamics than the orbits of planets. So I studied humanities subjects, then segued into law. A decade working on human rights caught up with me at the end of the 2010s, as the content of my doctorate on the Arab revolutions exploded out into the world and dragged me into an ethical quagmire about how one’s research can be weaponised. It was a brutalising experience that took place as the world imploded with Covid, and made me question everything I had worked on, as an academic of human rights law.

I became scared of the written word – something of a handicap for an academic in the era of “publish or perish”. I had the terrifying sense that anything I wrote could one day be used against me, and performed exhausting ethical algebra in my head, like a Rubik’s cube made out of nerve-endings, about the rights and wrongs of everything I had written in my work documenting crimes against humanity and mass atrocities.

I’d moved to Iceland at the end of the decade to find some calm and quiet, and yet was haunted, still, by the work I’d done on the worst of what humans can do to one another. Even after the first night, two months into my move to Iceland, that I saw the aurora borealis (Northern Lights), I went to bed and had a nightmare about mass graves. I couldn’t stay anchored in the moment to appreciate the astonishing other-worldly beauty of Iceland. The past kept creeping back in, in nightmares, restlessness, and intrusive thoughts.

I confessed to an Icelandic friend that, although I’d seen the Northern Lights, I didn’t feel like I had really experienced them, hadn’t had the reaction I’d heard others experience. He said: “OK, let’s get a telescope.” And we drove to a field outside Borganes, waiting for the aurora and, in the meantime, looking at the stars. At the start of the new decade, as the world imploded I finally felt it – finally really looking at the heavens. In the face of the stars, I finally felt peace.

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A growing number of researchers have found a connection between star-gazing and mental wellbeing, building upon the well-documented phenomenon that spending time surrounded by nature is good for mental health. A 2016 study by Coventry University found that “star-gazing helps promote various aspects of wellbeing through what researchers describe as an ‘increased sense of flow through fascination and loss of time’.” Dominic Gregory Vertue in South Africa, through the Office of Astronomy for Development, has looked at “the link between astronomy activities and the change in negativism in people with depression as they shift from a fixation on their own feelings to a larger perspective”, while in Arizona in the USA the Reach for the Stars non-profit organisation uses star-gazing to help young people with psychological and behavioural problems.

No wonder, then, that star-gazing events are increasingly popular. At the astronomy nights I have attended in Cambridge since returning, there is none of the – sometimes cloying, especially for older generations – explicit talk of “mindfulness” or “wellness”. It is not advertised as “for mental health”, and yet almost everyone I’ve met since attending these events has mentioned the positive psychological impact of star-gazing. One man in his seventies who I met at an astronomy night said that it helped him deal with the grief of his wife. A PhD student in his late 20s told me it helped more than any of the officially-prescribed practices of “meditation and mindfulness”, to help calm him and give him a sense of perspective.

Some do, however, explicitly combine the practice of star-gazing with psychological wellbeing. Mark Westmoquette, who has a PhD in astrophysics and now runs mindful star-gazing retreats in his capacity as a meditation teacher, has written a book called The Mindful Universe: A journey through the inner and outer cosmos. A good point he makes, one that resonated with my experiences in Icelandic winters, is that the brain needs dark as well as light – to star-gaze, we have to focus on the dark, immerse ourselves in the night, which helps our circadian rhythms, particularly in city life.

The mindfulness language is not for everyone – and critiques of the “wellness industry” have developed in recent years from across the political spectrum. But there is clearly a component of star-gazing that nourishes the soul, whether one wishes to frame that in a secular or religious sense. One of my new friends from attending astronomy events is a scholar of Orthodox Christianity, and sees in the religion a reverence for the cosmos that astronomy reflects. Soviet Russia may have banned religion, but Orthodoxy is woven into the twentieth-century experience of space exploration.

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I felt so changed by these experiences of star-gazing that I began to watch astronomy documentaries: first as a tool to stop my whirring mind that kept looping back to the human rights abuses I’d documented in the 2010s, and then – increasingly – as an end in themselves. I was in a state of permanent astonishment, learning – for the first time, in my thirties – about the size and contents of the universe, of the fabric of our reality. I signed up to study a new undergraduate degree, in Astronomy and Planetary Science, brushing up on my maths and plunging myself into books on physics. I also reconnected with the acquaintances from my postgraduate years who’d studied physics – realising that, in retrospect, they were the ones with whom I should have spent my time in the first place. With them there are no dramas, no flame-wars or Twitter-spats, but humility and thoughtfulness in discussions about the nature of the cosmos.

I also began to work on space law, as the best way to segue my current skill set, as an academic lawyer, into this new fascination. And it was here that I realised how much I had outgrown my old life and old friends. The concern in ecologically-minded circles about space exploration has been stated often, but what I did not expect was the level of vitriol from my progressive former friends. It was, they said, “immoral to care about space exploration when the world is on fire with the climate crisis, war and poverty”.

I’m currently writing a book on space law (no longer scared of the written word, I’m trying to make up for lost time) which tries to tackle this set of problems. I argue that space exploration is a force for good for humanity, and caring about the cosmos is an extension of caring for Earth (for one thing, it was satellites that taught us about climate change). So it should not be a question of “Earth not space”, but rather of making sure that – unlike the way we have treated Earth – we get space exploration right, for everyone and for the future. Perhaps our most human, most shared, characteristic is to look up at the skies, and to voyage, to venture out.

In the meantime, star-gazing remains an easy – and free – way to anchor oneself. You can rent a telescope from organisations (see, for instance, www.darkskytelescopehire.co.uk – I have no personal affiliation) for as little as £30. But as Mark Westmoquette notes, you don’t really need a telescope for star-gazing, nor even an app to tell you what you’re looking at. The stars are there for all of us. They can both guide us and ground us.

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