This site is operated and maintained by me, and I receive no funding for it. I created it to help others interested in amateur astronomy.
I am delighted to see that in the relatively short time it has been operating, it has had 124,000 views (to the end of 2025) and in December 2025 alone had 6,653 views! Most visitors arrive from the Cloudynights.com site (highly recommended), and the most popular pages are 1) Buying a Telescope – Start here, 2) Why Choose and Dobsonian? and my 3) Collimation Guide.
I started observing the night sky as a child when the astronauts on board Apollo 8 took a picture of Earth from space. A neighbour would invite me to join him and observe planets and double stars with a 3″ refractor telescope. We also went to talks at the Birmingham Astronomical Society. Shortly after, I had my own cheap 2″ refractor, and I was able to do my own observing. I still have my copy of Norton’s Star Atlas, which has been my companion along with Patrick Moore and The Sky at Night since 1969. I learnt the names of the constellations and was able to identify planets and the first magnitude stars.
Totally coincidentally, my brother-in-law’s uncle is George E Alcock. I had the pleasure of meeting “Uncle Eric” before he died in 2000. We spent the best part of a day in the Fens talking about our mutual interests – astronomy, radio and our shared teaching career. An honour and a pleasure.
Between 1971 and 2020, I continued to look up at night with my eyes and a pair of binoculars. A treat for me in recent years has been to travel to southern skies, where I was able to marvel at familiar yet upside-down constellations. Seeing Canis Major above my head in Cape Town was very strange, but the symmetrical Orion looked fine… But wasn’t Rigel where Betelgeuse should have been? Other highlights were looking at the Milky Way and Magallanic Clouds in Uluru, Australia, visiting the Palomar telescope in California and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
In 2020, I finally bought my second telescope, an 8″ Dobsonian, and so the journey continues…
I am a member of the Bromsgrove Astronomical Society and post as Spile on Cloudy Nights, Reddit and occasionally the Facebook Astronomy Groups.