And so the only place to be in Canberra on Tuesday night was at the Exploring The Milky Way presentation in the space-age-looking, flying saucery Shine Dome of the Australian Academy of Science.

One never enters the Shine Dome (sometimes called with affection 'The Martian Embassy') without half-imagining that one is checking in for an inter-galactic joy flight. The Dome looks like a parked flying saucer warming its engines.

And the Dome's space-age good looks and qualities are enhanced by what architecture enthusiast Colin Bisset describes as the way in which "the simple copper-covered dome springs from a narrow moat of silvery water like one of Saturn's rings".

And the Dome's eerie sci-fi-ness, one was reminded as one bustled to one's seat for radio astronomer Professor Naomi McClure-Griffiths' lecture, has some of the qualities of the Tardis of Dr Who. From the outside it seems petite (just as the Tardis seems to be just a telephone booth), but within it becomes, magically, a roomy auditorium.

Earlier this week Professor Cox, in Australia to stargaze, told his Fairfax interviewers that working out how to vote is a simple question of applying a scientific method.

"Look across the political landscape of any country, identify the people with blustering certitude and don't vote for them," he said.

Professor Cox told Fairfax he believes the humility required in good science could teach our politicians a few lessons.

"Science is not a collection of absolute truths. Scientists are delighted when we are wrong because it means we have learnt something."

Alas the people of the United States now have for their president the embodiment of "blustering certitude" in the anti-science, anti-facts Donald Trump. In reaction to him on 22 April there is to be a March for Science. The extravaganza of the day will be in Washington DC but Australian cities are joining in as well. One hopes that especially scientist-rich Canberra will strut its rational, reasoning, scientific stuff.

To digress a little for a moment and speaking of Trump, do readers who like me find everything about him disgusting still notice a strange inability to switch him off when he crops up on TV? Now I think I may have found the explanation of this phenomenon.

It comes in an online interview with the great US-Canadian illustrator Barry Blitt. The gifted Blitt, especially famous for his sometimes startling covers for The New Yorker magazine, despises Trump. And yet he, Blitt, finds Trump irresistible as a spectacle.

Blitt is a discerning student of human looks and collects on his computer pictures of people he wants to draw.

"And it just seems," he's marvelled to Mother Jones, "like every picture of Trump is a revelation."

"From any angle. I didn't know a person could look like that. His facial expressions - he really is a cartoon. He's like an instruction manual of how to caricature someone. I mean it's just all there.

"If you're asking me what features—obviously his hair. The back of his head is fantastic and his eyebrows are amazing. His overbite and his series of chins and the colour of him and the texture. It's amazing! He's like an artefact … I mean he's sculpted out of some kind of pudding, I think. It looks like his face is sort of melting slowly. He's some kind of bizarre sculpture. There's no one really who looks like that."

Yes! That's it! Blitt has nailed it. We cannot stop looking at something so strange. The president is a spectacle, an apparition, a bizarre pudding.

But back to earth, to the Dome and to the looming March for Science. Perhaps Tuesday's lecturer Professor McClure-Griffiths will take part in the march. She was born in America but now lives in Australia. That's because, she enthused on Tuesday, as a student of our planet's "home galaxy" the Milky Way our dear continent gives a fabulous view deep into "the CBD" of that galaxy while in the northern hemisphere the view is only of the galaxy's "boring suburbs". Professor Cox, too, has been reminding us how lucky stargazing Australians are to be blessed with such a sparkling firmament.

Your columnist, a migrant from relatively drab-skied England, has never stopped gasping at the Australian sky at night (seen somewhere away from the light pollution of big cities). In Banjo Paterson's Clancy of the Overflow the city-bound narrator envies Clancy because he, Clancy, is out in the bush a'droving and so gets to ogle "the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,/And at night the won'drous glory of the everlasting stars".

Not for the first time it occurs to me that Australians' love of Australia, something we struggle to define and express (how mawkish we become when we try, every Australia Day and every Anzac Day!) should be based on non-human Antipodean blessings like this.

Patriotism based on what we've done in tragic wars feels immature and schoolboyish. Instead, Australians all let us rejoice at our geographic good luck in our being privileged Clancys blessed with a grand, envy-of-the-world view of the CBD of our dear planet's home galaxy.