like with the planets' moons, it boggles my mind that all that glory has been hanging about up there for aeons waiting for us to get our shit together and work out optics
Yeah. There's something in Levi-Strauss about how he was shocked when one of the tribes he did fieldwork with pointed out a star (maybe the dog star?) to him, and he couldn't see it, thought they were shit talking, but they kept going on about it, pointed it out in the sky. He never saw it but came to the realisation that his eyes couldn't make it out, whereas theirs could, because he was too attuned to the lit city, whereas they still had nights full of stars.
Makes sense really if you think about how well developed astronomy / astrology was, from early on.
It's like we now need new machines to see, cos of all the shit we've put in the way.