Sometimes I reach even higher than the sky: I seek the stars. One day last week, for example, I found myself at the European Southern Observatory in Garching, north of Munich.
It is one of the foremost astronomical observatories in the world, housed in a large, curvaceous, modern building in a rural setting, but it has a strange lacuna for such an institution - not a single telescope in sight. All its instruments are on mountains thousands of miles away in northern Chile.
The idea of establishing a large observatory to provide world-class research facilities for the common use of astronomers was conceived in the early 1950s. About a decade later was born the European Southern Observatory, or ESO, jointly funded by the governments of nine European countries. But an important issue had to be resolved: where to place the defining implements, the telescopes.
Nearly all of mainland Europe was too cloudy or too polluted for the purpose. Moreover, the Americans had enough installations in the northern hemisphere to serve nearly everybody's needs, while the southern hemisphere, as a vantage point for viewing outer space, was under-utilised.
Attention focused, therefore, on the high mountains of Chile in the vicinity of the Atacama desert.
Altitude is attractive to astronomers because the light that provides images from space is obliged to travel through only a shallow, tenuous layer of the normally distorting atmosphere before it hits a telescope.
In addition, the Atacama desert is probably the driest place on Earth. This means cloud-free nights almost throughout the year, and also the absence of water vapour provides air of quite exceptional clarity. And for obvious reasons, the region is very thinly populated, so sources of manmade pollution or interfering artificial light are almost non-existent.
The first telescope at La Scilla, 7500ft above sea level, saw "First Light" in 1969. A more recent development has been the building of VLT, on Cerro Paranal, a mountain of similar altitude 300 miles to the north; this latter is in fact an array of many telescopes which, used in combination, give an unprecedented multifaceted, ultra-high-resolution view of outer space.
All these instruments feed their data via satellite to Garching, where it is used by ESO research scientists. The ESO headquarters now houses one of the largest and fastest-growing online archives of astronomical data in the world.