When I’d reached the end of the star tunnel a few minutes earlier, I’d tried to look into eternity myself. The tunnel aperture is wide up there, as wide as the orbit of Polaris, as viewed from Earth’s surface in 15,000AD. In my mind, I tried to go further than that. I tried to push past the current ‘great year’, the one bound by this specific cycle of precession. After all, Hipparchus might have seen deeper patterns in the sky than his predecessors, but he wasn’t the last link in the chain. Modern astronomers tell us that there are greater years than his, like the sun’s orbit around the black hole at the Milky Way’s heart, which takes nearly a quarter of a billion years to complete. In only a few million, the solar sphere will have blasted its way to a new part of the galaxy, bringing a fresh batch of stars into our sky. The current constellations will have faded from view, even those that sit close to the pole like Polaris. Star Axis will have fallen into ruin by then, but even if not, the aperture at the top of the tunnel will frame blackness. The celestial sphere that once symbolised eternity will have revealed itself to be a slave to larger cycles, immense increments of time that are themselves glimmers in a grander scheme. After all, this universe has rhythms that make the sun’s entire existence look like the flash of a firefly. Some of them are known, like the life cycle of cosmic energy, from big bang to heat death. Others are mysterious, and could forever remain so.

This is the most perfect thing I’ve read in some time. The writing and the subject are—almost literally—timeless.

Star Axis is a profound meditation on the sky – Ross Andersen – Aeon