WHEN I was a little boy, my mother took me to the London Planetarium. I was mesmerised, utterly enchanted. When the lights went down and the night sky suddenly appeared above us, it was like real magic, completely immersive.

Unlike staring at a screen whose very frame defines you as being outside and apart from what you’re watching, in the planetarium I could look up anywhere, and turn around, and, wherever I looked, I was still inside the vision.

And then, of course, the magic deepened: the projection gave us the experience of “lifting off”, of travelling up closer towards particular stars or galaxies, and, when we came back down, there was a final magic touch, as the speaker directed us towards particular constellations: Orion with his belt, Ursa Major, Taurus. Even as he named them, beautiful silver lines appeared, as if drawn that moment in the heavens, to join up the stars and show us the shape of those imagined celestial beings.

It was the one example of an image, a projection, a simulacrum, that has sent me back to the real thing re-enchanted and eager for more, and has restored my sense of wonder. As a result of that visit, I joined the astronomy club at school, and was shown how to find the planets, as well as the stars, and to look at them through a telescope. My father gave me a star-map with all the constellations drawn in, and told me some of the Greek myths and stories that lay behind them. Later still, I found the great passages in English poetry which celebrate the stars and starlight: the lovely passage in The Merchant of Venice:

Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings.

And the star-lit opening of Milton’s Comus:

Before the starry threshold of Jove’s course
My mansion is, where those immortal shapes
Of bright aerial spirits live insphered
In regions mild of calm and serene air
Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
Which men call Earth.

All this came back to me, with a new layer of wonder and understanding, as I paid a visit to the planetarium in the Manitoba Museum, here in Winnipeg. The difference, this time, was that our tour of the stars and constellations was led by an Indigenous Canadian, one of the Cree people, who shared with us the star-maps and star stories that he had received from his grandparents, and they from theirs.

As he spoke, he, too, drew the constellations in silver lines on the dome above us. This time, there were different celestial creatures: a wolf, a caribou, and, most wonderfully, a huge celestial sturgeon swimming across the night sky, traversing the Milky Way, his tail in the past with the ancestors, his snout in the future with those yet to be born, and his heart in the present with us. The one constellation that they saw in common with us was the Great Bear, whom they called Mista Muskwa: a marauder who had been chased up to the skies by a flock of beneficent birds, all turned now to shining stars.

I felt simultaneously the kinship of connection and the thrill of difference, as two mythologies met, patterning and repatterning the night sky that is common to us all in the northern hemisphere.