Cheap binoculars rekindled Shaun Keaveny’s love of space. So did a wheelie bin…
I’m a broadcaster, so I like to make sense of the world through words. I’m terrible with maths. Maths has the equivalent effect on my brain of trying to drive around Tokyo in an articulated lorry whilst high on peyote. Despite this arithmetic antipathy, I’ve always been fascinated with physics and astronomy.
In such situations, it is good to have friends in high places. Or rather, friends who know about high places. So it was that, around 2008, I first made tentative footfall on the planet Brian Cox. We started having weekly science chats on my BBC Radio 6 Music show. I’d ask him utterly thick questions like “why can’t I see torchlight during the day?”. But somewhere among the playful idiocy, there would be shards of genuine insight and understanding that inflated my sense of wonder.
All this wonder led to me to reading Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, which further elevated my curiosity and ability to imagine the far reaches of the ever-expanding Universe of which we are a vanishingly minuscule part. I acquired a big telescope, and another great physics mind, the dapper Dr Paul Abel [longtime BBC Sky at Night Magazine contributor and co-presenter of our monthly Virtual Planetarium], offered to pop round and set it up for me. Within an hour, I was surveying the majestic tapestry of the skies, and watching the pinpricks of her moons glitter across Jupiter’s face (don’t mention her big red spot or she’ll get embarrassed). I was drunk on the unfolding secrets of the velvety night sky!
But then what? Life, kids, work, hard times, fun times… they all got in the way, like they do. The telescope was packed away. Still it collects dust, some of it inevitably star-derived. My curiosity was packed away with it for a while.
But
