Richard Francis

My first astronomical memory is being taken out to see comet Arend-Roland in my mother’s arms in 1957. I was only 5! But I as a teenager in the mid-1960’s I got hooked. First sitting in the garden in our dark north-Wales skies with a star-chart from the newspaper, then with my dad’s binoculars, and finally with my first telescope. I made many drawings of lunar craters. With university in a big city (Physics, then PhD in Space Physics) astronomy wasn’t really possible, and that difficulty continued with jobs in built-up areas and a young family. My interest went into hibernation. But by the mid 1990’s it was waking up and at the end of the century it broke out. I bought the first of a succession of new telescopes and become more and more hooked on imaging. I lived in The Netherlands at the time and built a dome observatory to try to ameliorate the local conditions. Then, before retirement, I found a new home in SW France largely guided by the needs of astronomy (dark, good horizon …). There I built a bigger observatory, later joined by another, and kitted them out with more scopes than you can shake a stick at. Retirement is wonderful!