Space Travel for Beginners

When he moved to the mountains of Andalucía in 1999, the first housewarming present John Gill received was a telescope. While small - a three-inch aperture reflector, nicknamed Cleo, after its donor - it rekindled a childhood fascination with astronomy and set him on a journey into both space and time. From a rooftop terrace half a mile above sea level in the Serranía de Ronda mountains, he began locally, with the Moon, but soon found himself at the limits of the solar system. With Cleo's reach failing, he hitched aboard a variety of other craft - from the Royal Observatory at Greenwich to the Hubble Space Telescope, via Mount Palomar and the SETI project - on a journey to the edge of space, where 'lookback time', the time light takes to reach Earth from astronomical objects, stretches back some 13.666 billion light years (and counting...), the assumed age of the known universe. Away from his telescope, he also immersed himself in his new community, not least by becoming a music columnist - in Spanish - on a small underground arts magazine, discovering an entirely different Spain to the culture, often driven by expatriates, to be found forty miles away on the Costa del Sol. He interlaces his stop-offs at the way stations to the stars with sideways observations on a modern society coming to terms with a feudal past in a young democracy barely thirty years old. Space Travel for Beginners follows on from his earlier The Stars Over Paxos, about a year on a Greek island armed only with binoculars and a clifftop launchpad barely one hundred feet above the Ionian Sea. Like his hero, Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar, it is concerned with the near and the far, the big and the small, the present, the future and the deep past.