3 ideas
Light travels at a finite speed, so every star is seen as it was when its light left it, years or millennia ago, not as it is now. The night sky is therefore not a single present moment but a layered archive of different pasts. A star we see may already have changed or vanished.
Astronomical numbers mean nothing to the mind until they are translated into familiar units, such as how long a train, a walker, or a sound signal would take to cover the distance, or a scale model in which the Sun is a ball and the planets are grains placed far apart. The method is to hold one everyday quantity fixed and show how far past human experience the real figure runs. The emptiness between bodies then becomes something the reader can feel.
Seeing Earth as a small planet circling an ordinary star among countless others makes national rivalries, class arrogance and war look petty and absurd. Knowing the heavens is therefore an ethical and social education, not just a technical one. It builds humility and a sense of shared human fate.