Hello and welcome to Stories of Scotland, a podcast about Scottish history, nature and folk lore.

I'm Jenny and I have a thin atmosphere. And I'm Annie and I have moons orbiting me.

This week we're zooming out a little

and then a little bit more

because we're talking about Scotland in space.

One of the most awe-inspiring sites

in all the world is the night sky.

And you don't have to be a rocket scientist

to appreciate it.

For millennia, we humans have been using astronomy, the study of everything beyond the Earth's

atmosphere, to track the passing of seasons and our movement through space. The stars have been

guiding folk through the phases of life for as long as we've

been looking up. A good example of this comes from oral histories of Shetland. These explain that

some folk were able to tell the time by simply looking at the stars. If you didn't have a watch,

then it didn't matter, as you knew that at the

start of November, the Pliades, also known as the Seven Sisters, would rise at six in the evening

and sat at six in the morning. And of course, before GPS, sailors would navigate the vast ocean by the positions of the Sun and the North Star.

Knowing your sky map was a pretty crucial skill if you wanted to survive out on the water.

Scotland has also had an astronomically big impact on our understanding of space, of the planets and what they're made of.

In exploring this history, we see the scientific side of Scotland shine.

It's the shimmering silver lining to our long winter nights.

When researching this episode, I began to think about stars and stones, and about how ancient peoples of Scotland would line up standing stones or cairns to celestial events.

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