Could there have been a better place to see the recent Perseid meteor shower than Patrick Moore’s back garden?  Conversation was a little on the difficult side, since invariably the person you were talking to would suddenly shriek and look over your shoulder at an impressive shower that you had just missed because you were looking the wrong way.

It was quite heart warming to see Brian May adjusting his camera tripod along with the other watchers.  I’d always wanted to meet him, ever since he wrote the first rock number about the relativistic time dilation effects of faster than light travel (’39’).  He really is a gentleman and it was a pleasure to view the night sky with him.

A certain amount of nerdy lust was caused by the equipment of the radio astronomers that were there with a set-up that allowed us to hear the meteors coming through the atmosphere.  Taken together with the extremely good chilli, known to the local takeaway as Astronomers Chilli, it was a grand night out.