Mark Harman

Curiously my interest in astronomy started sometime in the early 1960s’ when I was given a copy of Norton’s Star Atlas by mistake. It was included in a job-lot of old Hollywood Film Star annuals I was given by a family friend who presumably thought that Arthur Philip Norton’s famous atlas detailed the location of stars on Beverly Hills rather than the celestial sphere!  When, after considerable period of confusion and bewilderment at its contents, I was eventually able to reconcile the curious black dots on the star maps with the patterns of actual stars in the night sky, I became hooked! (Whilst Norton’s Star Atlas is hardly the ideal first book to inspire a young astronomer, I survived the ‘In at the deep-end’ approach and began my journey on a fascinating life-long hobby). Back then I lived in south Hertfordshire under what was once a dark rural night sky and I grew up in that new era of space travel and satellites. How pleased I would be at spotting a rare passage of Echo 2 crossing the cold, pitch-black night sky between myriads of stars. Little did I realize that many years later both satellites and light-pollution would do much to confound my precious hobby. I retired in 2012 having spent 43 years working in the field of water pollution research including topics such as the development of novel bio-electronic sensor systems for pollution detection, computer-controlled imaging techniques for microscopy, the detection of immuno-fluorescence labelled water-borne parasites using flow-cytometry and environmental toxicology. After retirement I realized my long-held ambition of operating my own observatory housing a remotely operated C-11 SCT configured for narrow-band astrophotography at my home in South Oxfordshire. Despite being a poor substitute for the wonder and romance of real-time visual observation through a large telescope, I find that astrophotography does at least enable me to study and enjoy the beauty and splendor of objects far beyond my moderately light-polluted, albeit satellite-infested, night sky.

Local societies
Newbury Astronomical Society