Try to imagine the shower scene in Psycho without shrieking violins. Or Jaws without the accelerating two-note theme that signals the arrival of the shark. Or Star Wars without blazing brass playing over the main title crawl.

A stargazer is also a time traveler, and telescopes allow us to venture to the most distant and ancient reaches of the universe. Even hurtling through space at 186,000 miles per second, it takes light from the next closest star over four years to reach Earth. And compared with the grand scale of the cosmos, four years is nothing. Most of the celestial objects we can glimpse in the night sky are hundreds or thousands of light-years away. So, in a very real sense, peering through the eyepiece of a telescope is a journey through space and time.