THERE'S great TV to be seen each evening this week on BBC2 as Stargazing Live has returned to our screens.
I wish it had been a subject at school all those years ago with the teacher leading the class clearly enthused about the stuff he was teaching. (I'll return to this matter on another Blog).
Anyway, Professor Brian Cox - yes, it's the brainy D:Ream bloke again - is once again educating and enlightening us on things I don't claim to understand in the slightest but sound, for want of a better word, astronomical.
Maths at school was a complete waste of time for me. Bloody hated the subject and found it so tedious, especially calculus (for me, he was Tintin's eccentric professor pal), logarithms (do they still do them?) and algebra (x +y - x = whatever). Could never get into it at all.
So you'd naturally expect, when maths and massive numbers are mentioned with carefree abandon by the experts talking about the universe, that I'd switch off.
Far from it.
I'm just in complete awe of what they're talking about. Even if I don't really understand it. Which I don't.
There was a sequence in tonight's programme, for instance, where a mathematical formula had been found to calculate, roughly, the age of the universe. Apparently it's around 15 billion years or so. How that figure was reached, God (literally) only knows.
What I do know is it was all incredibly entertaining and made me want to find out more about what's above us.
There was also a really interesting piece about the red supergiant star Betelgeuse. This thing is big. And when I say big, I really do mean seriously vast. Apparently, it's diameter is about 1,000 times bigger than our own Sun. In fact, if it were placed in the position of the Sun, its surface would stretch out past Mars!
And the thing about Betelgeuse is it could explode anytime soon! It's burnt away all of its hydrogen leaving helium and could blow big style, creating a supernova. We would see the light from this explosion on Earth for a fortnight!
All this only added to the 'wow factor' the programme generated. There's an event at Martin Mere on the 19th of this month between 7pm and 9pm where you can go stargazing with experts on hand to tell you what you're looking at so I'm aiming to go to that - it promises to be great, so long as the sky is clear.
The main feeling I got from watching the programme is how completely insignificant Earth is in relation to the rest of the Universe. We're just a tiny pinprick of a microdot on the whole, ever-moving picture of the Universe.
It certainly makes you think as well as making you want to gaze upwards to the heavens and ask that question we all ask and want to know the definitive answer to: Just why are we all here?
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