Chapter One
The Sky That Sees Everything
Here is a secret that most of the world’s stargazers would trade their telescopes for: if you live near the equator, in Puchong or Penang, Kuching or Kota Bharu, you live under the best sky on Earth.
Not the darkest, perhaps. Not the driest. But the most complete.
Stand tonight in your garden, or on your balcony between the drying racks, and understand what you are standing on. The Earth is a ball, and you are positioned on its waistline. From the North Pole, an observer sees only the northern half of the heavens; the southern stars never rise for them, not once in a lifetime. From New Zealand, the reverse: the Great Bear crawls forever out of reach below the horizon. But from the equator, over the course of a single year, every star that exists to be seen will at some point climb into your sky. The Pole Star sits on your northern horizon like a lamp left on a distant gatepost. The Southern Cross clears the sea in the south. Orion strides directly overhead. You are the only kind of observer on this planet who is denied nothing.
Astronomers have a phrase for the band of sky where the Sun, Moon and planets travel: the ecliptic. From London or Tokyo it slouches across the southern sky. From Malaysia it passes almost straight overhead, which means the Moon rides high and clear of the haze, the planets burn at the zenith where the air is thinnest, and the zodiac is not a low mural but a ceiling.
