ONCE upon a time, when I was a professional astronomer, I enjoyed a stint at a big telescope in the southern hemisphere. During an observing break, I went outside with colleagues and, with the aid of a star map, we began searching the sky for the Large Magellanic Cloud. When we found it, we cringed with embarrassment: this satellite galaxy of our Milky Way was a huge smudge, about six times the apparent size of the moon.
I use this example to illustrate how professional astronomers, reliant on software to steer their telescopes, can be poor at finding their way…
