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The life and times of one of the BAA’s most extraordinary Presidents and eclipse chasers is described, including his fascination with the rings of Saturn, his remarkable physical and mental stamina, his complex home life and (in Part II) his tragic demise.

The purpose of this paper is to bring to the attention of the amateur astronomical community the writer’s discovery of a previously unknown class of object, the significance of which does not appear to have been reported in amateur publications.

Ole Rømer (1644−1710) is remembered today for establishing, from observations of eclipses of the Galilean satellites of Jupiter, that the velocity of light is finite. This paper describes the use of amateur timings of Galilean eclipses observed during 2012−’14 to recreate Rømer’s work, together with a theoretical investigation of the accuracy of such approaches for estimating the speed of light.