My daughter and I took my small granddaughter for an eagerly awaited visit to the local observatory at night. She dearly wanted to look through the telescope and see the nearest visible planets, and we were desperately hoping for a clear, dry night. Imagine our disappointment when the night was cloudy, and there were not even any stars visible.

Before they took us upstairs for the telescope viewing they showed a short film, and during this film the guide told us that we would probably not be able to see anything through the telescope that night as the cloud had thickened and it even looked like rain. My daughter was unusually quiet and was sitting with her eyes closed.

As they led us upstairs to the viewing room I asked her what she had been thinking about. She said, “I was visualising a vacuum cleaner sucking up all the clouds, and the guide saying, I don’t believe it. The sky has cleared!.” My granddaughter was first in the queue, and as the guide operated the machinery to open the roof, he said – you guessed it – “I don’t believe it. The sky has cleared.”

We had a magically clear view of the planets and my granddaughter was “over the moon” so to speak! We had both previously read “The Secret” and though we were not surprised at this, the guide could not get over it, and said, “I have never seen anything like how fast the sky had cleared.”