“What do you see when you look at the stars? Science, heaven, God?” the Italian Catholic newspaper, Avvenire, asked me recently. Does the sky look any different to a professional astronomer who is also a person of faith?

The first thing I see when I look up at night is the beauty of the stars … just like anyone who can see the night sky.

But I do see more. My father, a US Army Air Corps navigator who once guided a wing of American bombers across the Atlantic to England in 1942, taught me the brighter navigation stars when I was a child.