Patrick Moore’s final Sky at Night

Last night I was working on my astronomy course as I’d got a coursework deadline today. I got it finished just before midnight which was good timing as it meant I could watch Patrick Moore’s final Sky at Night before bed.
It was an enjoyable and fitting tribute. It appeared that part of the show was a planned feature recorded before his death, on setting up a new telescope, where some lucky members of the public were at Patrick’s Selsey home in Selsey, Sussex. This was followed by clips that reminded me what an inspiration and an entertainer he was. Usually Sky at a night isn’t on iPlayer until all the repeats have shown. This month it is up after the first broadcast. His death, combined with this week’s BBC Stargazing Live is likely to mean this episode will pick up a lot more views than usual.
It won’t be the same without Patrick but I do hope the series continues.

National Space Centre – Leicester

We have a National Space Centre. It’s in Leicester. Given that I’ve always viewed any aspirations we may have about a space programme through the prism of an Eddie Izzard routine “We didn’t have enough money to put a man in a track suit up a ladder!” both these facts surprise me.

The other weekend I decided I wanted to go see a proper planetarium show. I decided against the one at the Think Tank in Birmingham because I didn’t really want to pay to go into the Think Tank again. A quick Google told me that the National Space Centre also had the Patrick Moore Planetarium so that was my decision. One of my friends came with me and we were there for about 6 hours. It was £13 to get in which was reasonable and by doing a gift Aid on it this gives return visits within a year. I’ll be going back again I think.

We took in a couple of planetarium shows. The first was the free one called “We Are Aliens” which was better than I expected being a CGI thing for the kids. For some reason it was a bit dark, kind of like the light loss you get with 3D but we weren’t wearing 3D glasses. It was impressive though being projected across the entire dome and there was some interesting stuff on exoplanets. There was a nice Solar System flythrough that I particularly liked.
We also went to a later proper planetarium night sky show which cost an extra £3. I could have done with a little less about the mythology relating to the constellations and more stuff to look at being pointed out. As it was I drifted off on my own a bit during the legends of Perseus and Andromeda and went did a bit of constellation spotting of my own, looking for other targets that I knew should be there that weren’t pointed out. They had pointed out Cassiopeia, Orion, Taurus, Andromeda, Perseus, Pegassus, the Plough. I also spotted M31 – the Andromeda Galaxy, the Hyades cluster, M45 – the Pleiades, the double cluster in Perseus, Jupiter and quite a few others.

There’s some good exhibition areas too. They’ve a Soyuz hanging over the main ticket area and a couple of rockets in the rocket tower. The Into Space area was one of the best, probably because it had stuff, a lot of which seemed to have been used by the most famous British Astronaut, Helen Sharman.

In the rocket tower they had a display that showed the “Space Race” on a timeline. One of the display objects that excited me was the set of Brooke Bond Tea Cards that I had as a kid. Driving home this evening I was listening to The Infinite Monkey Cage Podcast and Brian Cox was talking about how he’d been inspired by these as a boy too.

Other areas such as Exploring the Universe had to rely on models and information boards. These were pitched at a good level though, understandable to children and those with very little understanding of the subject, but at the same time giving adults and those with greater knowledge something to think about.
There was also a section called Tranquility Base where there were interactive things to play with and some sort of 3D simulator ride that we actually ran out of time to have a go on. Next time.
All in all, a great day out. Just one word of warning. Even though the car park is dedicated to the site, it’s still pay and display. I only realised as we were heading back to the car. I guess I might have been a bit too excitable when we arrived. Luckily I got away with it.

Patrick Moore – Yearbook of Astronomy free ebooks

Every year since 1962 Patrick Moore has produced a Yearbook of Astronomy. These excellent books usually contain observing notes for the coming year, a review of the previous year and a selection of articles and essays. I have a few old copies of them and they’re a nice thing to have and are interesting even though they’re out of date in many respects. I’ve just found a load from the first one in 1962 up to 1979, with a few gaps, available as eBooks in a variety of formats on the Internet Archive. I’ve downloaded all they have and stuck them on my Kobo eReader.

Obviously they’re not as good in this format as the real thing so if you ever find an old one in a dusty corner second hand bookshop then it’d be gratefully received. I’m always happy to buy you a pint in return.

Moon

Been thinking about the moon a fair bit in the last few days. Firstly to mark the death of Neil Armstrong on Saturday. It’s a shame I didn’t get the news until I’d got home from Exmoor where there is no mobile signal and definitely no 3G else I’d have spent some time taking a look around the Sea of Tranquility through the thin cloud.
I bought a copy of another old book today, Patrick Moore’s Moon Flight Atlas. A brilliant book that I remember borrowing from the library time and time again as a child. It filled me with awe and wonder then how we could go to the moon. Still does. It’s amazing to think 40 years have passed and it all occurred before I could remember.
A few years ago I visited the Smithsonian Air and Space museum in Washington DC. Two things struck me there. Firstly they had the command module from Apollo 11 encased in Perspex. It was incredible how small it was and the damage on the heat shield showed it to be made of what looked like chicken wire. There was also a mock up of a lunar lander and that really did look like it was made in a shed by some enthusiasts. This is the technology that put man on the moon! They say there’s more computing power in the phone that I write this post on than uses in those missions.
But still the moon landings are a memory for my parents generation.
I was out in the garden earlier this evening putting the damp tent from the weekend up to dry out. It started raining so I came in. Just been out again to do the bins and the moon was looking magnificent between the trees. Took a quick photo or two on my phone, as above.
This week there’s a blue moon. Not that rare an occurrence really. Second full moon in a month is all that means.

Old Books

I’m a sucker for a second hand bookshop. Today I picked up a couple of great old books on Astronomy in one for less than £3 each.
The Observer’s Book Of Astronomy from 1965 by (not yet Sir) Patrick Moore.
This is a classic from the Observer’s series of books which had a field guide format and very much geared to observing planets, stars and constellations.

The second and more interesting book was The Modern Universe by Raymond A Lyttleton, written in 1956. I was chuffed to look him up on Wikipedia to find he was a local chap from Oldbury, educated at King Edward’s in Birmingham and a cricketting friend of Fred Hoyle who got Hoyle into Astronomy.

I’ve only had a quick flick through the book. It starts with chapters on the Earth, The Moon, Planets and Comets, The Sun, Stars and Galaxy before getting the final chapter on “The Expanding Universe”. Whilst the expanding model had been known about for quite a while since Lemaitre proposed it and Hubble provided the empirical evidence of receding redshifted galaxies to back it up, it was still very much a matter for discussion and the book does discuss the two proposed theories of the time. “The first of them has been termed the ‘big bang’ hypothesis…” Note the lower case and the inverted commas. It also discussed the “steady-state theory of the universe”.
It was still to be a few years until the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background in 1964 which effectively did for the Steady State Theory. I’m not sure which side of this debate Lyttleton was on, if any. He doesn’t seem to come out in favour of either but presents both as possibilities. It’s interesting to read what was thought of the origins and the state of the universe back in 1956.