Terry Pratchett the Astronomer
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Written by terrypratchettbooks.org
Monday, 08 August 2005 |
I was watching BBC 4 in England last night where there was a programme on about amateur astronomers. It was all pretty interesting and had me very much captivated, talking about how back yard astronomy had come so far and how the people taking part play such a huge role in the discovery of new stellar objects. Later the programme took an interesting turn for the better, for a Discworld fan anyway, when Terry Pratchett was introduced as one of England’s most famous amateur astronomers. He took the producer to his own personal observatory in his verdant back garden, it was a pretty decent sized dome that he’d had specially built by a friend of his who is a boat builder. The roof of the dome was basically the same technology used to build boats, with an electric motor to pull back a shutter to reveal the night sky. The dome rests on a circular wall of stylish brickwork with cobblestones embedded, creating an interesting feature to otherwise ordinary bricks...
It was intriguing as a Discworld fan to see Terry Pratchett was interested in something that I myself have a passion for; owning a nice Newtonian telescope and running, with my wife Marcia, a website on astronomy – www.planet-surveyor.com - The programme left Terry for a while to talk about other aspects of back yard astronomy, such as how super high tech equipment is now readily available to pretty much anybody, that the average enthusiast has equipment that would have been unaffordable to large organisations only a few years ago.
Nearer to the end of the show I was treated to another insight into Mister Pratchett’s ideas and thoughts, he even went into how his love for space and astronomy was pretty much the deciding factor that lead him into a life of writing about science fiction, universal matters and turtles in outer space. I was one very happy Terry Pratchett fan having caught that show by accident after being up too late working on my computer.
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