I used to ‘believe’ in UFOs. I had loads of books. I lived within 2 hours of the ‘Welsh Triangle’ (off the Pembrokeshire Coast). I’d seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind – the original and the special edition. But over the years I grew to believe that people are easily influenced or quick to mistake one thing for another. My interest waned (although I am still convinced that in a universe so large, we can’t be the only ones here).

So imagine my surprise when, while observing the Pleiades with a low power eyepiece, the Death Star flashed across my field of view. My boyhood dream had come true – Star Wars was real. I jumped. The cat jumped.

Alas, the accompanying faint roar of four jet engines, the flashing anti-collision lights and the straight line movement I could see when I looked up from the telescope at the general patch of sky told me it was just another airliner heading back to Heathrow.

After it had gone, the cat and I settled back for a pleasant hour’s observation. By now I’d started to amass a list of objects to view culled from discussions on SGL, books, magazines and my distant childhood memories. Okay, there weren’t many of the latter as it was a long time ago.

I went in search of the two galaxies, M81 and M82. I managed to find both but they were extremely faint and to see them I used another technique learnt since I started stargazing – averted vision. The theory is (I think) that if you don’t look directly at something, it doesn’t think you can see it and it won’t hide. It worked for me and I caught my first glimpse of immensely distant and massive objects.

What exactly is 10 million light years?