“I think I see Venus!” our friend exclaimed as we emerged out of a tunnel into a snowy pasture. “Can we stay here for five more minutes please?”

I stared at him in half horror. The skies had darkened, the wind was picking up and my hands were starting to get frosty; we had spent the first half of the day being terrible at learning to ski, and the second half dragging our sore legs through the snow on this hike. All I wanted right then was to spend the rest of the evening dunking my frozen body in a scalding hot bath and poking my iced fingers into the holes of a radiator in our warm hotel room afterwards.

“I just need five minutes,” he insisted. “I really need to figure out which planet that is.” He whipped out his stargazing app with a wild urgency and the other two trudged across the snow to join him. I watched as they eagerly gestured to the skies, rattling off the names of several constellations.

To their north stood a peak bathed in alpenglow, flanked by silhouettes of firs rising into the pink sky. A sliver of the moon glittered to its left. We had reached the end of a trail that involved a long circular walk along the Möserer valley – one that started with a hike through a decidedly un-snowy forest and witnessed in its short lifetime several unsuccessful drone landings by my husband thanks to his newfound identity of being a drone owner. It had been turning out to be an unseasonably warm December; while the trail’s online description promised ‘snow-covered winter landscapes’ along the way, initially we had to settle for patches of snow and plenty of slush throughout the forest. The description redeemed itself, however, when we emerged out to sweeping panoramic views of the Tyrolean Alps across the Möserer valley. And soon enough, the season’s true nature surfaced. It started to get bitterly cold – and it was around this point at which I started wanting to get back home and my friend decided to prolong our hike.

Despite all this, I couldn’t help but laugh as I watched the three of them crane their necks towards the skies, hands shivering in pockets, the cold forgotten in a moment of astronomical wonder. And what could I do but join them, and allow myself to partake in this brief, strange sense of collective bewilderment? I ran over, my boots scrambling for purchase under the sinking snow. “So what are we looking at?” I breathed expectantly.

I looked up to where they pointed. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, the stars began to rise into my vision – at first one gleaming dot, and then dozens, and then hundreds of glistening specks against the night sky. Some twinkled, and some didn’t – those were the planets, I was told – and the very first one my friend saw, the planet that set these five minutes in motion in the first place, turned out to be Jupiter and not Venus after all. Oh Jupiter, you almost froze my fingers right off.

As we stood there in middle of the snow-sheathed meadow, blinking into the starlit winter night, five minutes melted into ten, and then fifteen. A lone cross-country skier whizzed by us and into the horizon. Did he know he skied beneath a spinning galaxy?