The Distant Stargazer

So many books explain in fine detail the ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘how’ of stargazing but very few explain ‘why’. The Distant Stargazer offers a somewhat different perspective in that it seeks to explain why anyone would wish to suffer hours of cold and discomfort simply to study the night sky.
When he was a boy, raised in the English Midlands in the 1970’s, the salesman would rise at 3am on a winter’s morning just to stand under a star-filled canopy and he felt awestruck and humbled by what he saw. He loved the simple things such as ‘the sound of frosted blades of grass scrunching underfoot’ and found that silent time to be an opportunity to imagine a future filled with opportunity.
The boy wasn’t able to fulfil his dream of being a professional stargazer and, three decades on, we find him living on the other side of the world in Australia – a divorced, jaded and homesick salesman. But ‘it’s never too late to become the person we might have been’ and he is given a chance to rediscover that child-like sense of magic and wonder when he stumbles across old notes written under the stars on winter’s evenings back home in Shropshire so many years beforehand. What he reads is the catalyst for a strange dream he has while camping in the Australian Bush, and this points to a different, brighter future, offering him the chance to, spiritually, finally return ‘home’.
The Distant Stargazer is not ‘just another book on Astronomy’ because primarily it is intended for those who, like the author, wish to rekindle the passion for life that we somehow managed to misplace along the way with the passing of the years. Those strange and magical feelings are still there; we just need to go looking in a different place.