A couple of years ago I spent a night in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. I'm a primary school teacher from Ulaanbaatar, and some colleagues and I took a group of older students on a field trip during the summer holidays.
We stayed in traditional gers at a small camp, and after dinner the camp owner, an older man called Bat, switched off the generator and told everybody to walk a short distance away from the tents. At first it was so dark that I couldn't even see my own hand. Then, as my eyes adjusted, the sky just filled up. I'm not exaggerating when I say there were thousands of stars, and you could clearly see the Milky Way stretching right across the sky like a cloud of dust. Bat pointed out a few constellations and told us the old Mongolian names for them, and the children were lying on the sand counting shooting stars and shrieking every time they spotted one.
What I felt was a kind of awe, which is hard to describe. I've lived in the capital my whole life, where the pollution and lights mean you see maybe a dozen stars on a good night. Seeing the real sky made me feel incredibly small, but in a comforting way, as if my everyday worries about lesson plans and bills didn't really matter. I also felt quite proud watching the students, because some of them had never been outside the city either, and they were completely silent with wonder. Since then I've tried to include more astronomy in my lessons, because that night showed me how much curiosity it can spark.