Microcosmic

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet with ape-descended life forms one of whom writes a blog about his piece of countryside which he calls 'the patch'. Apologies to Douglas Adams & Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The Sun and Moon are visible from my small plot of south Lancashire as, of course, is the whole of the night sky, but what has astronomy got to do with the patch? The answer is flippin’ well everything! 1) The patch is part of the universe   ...self-evidently 2) Everything comes from stars . The ‘stuff’ of the patch, along with our bodies and everything else on Earth, was formed inside stars billions of years ago. When Joni Mitchell sang ‘we are stardust’ she wasn’t just coming over all hippy (and indeed dippy) ...she was right.