It's just occurred to that I'm never going to 'get' any of the people I'm writing about in my PhD because I am probably never going to see the sky they saw. Like, I'm writing all about the poetic conflation of Heaven and the heavens and about life on other planets and shit and seeing photos of really clear nights in those places still not badly affected by light or air pollution made me realise that, yeah, actually, I can see why people thought it was obvious that aliens existed given the cosmic multitudes they might have been able to see, or that angels lived in/were stars (it gets a bit confused). Like, the H/heavenly hosts, I get it.
And even though my guys are victorian so the air pollution would have been even worse in cities, the air and light pollution would have been much better in rural areas, and my guys were all from like, the highlands of Scotland ans stuff. They saw the skies. And unless I get very lucky in Chile or somewhere, I'm probably only going to see pictures.
