A TRIBUTE TO ‘THE SKY AT NIGHT’ PRESENTER, SIR PATRICK MOORE
An appreciation by Mat Irvine Sir Patrick Moore, creator and presenter of ‘The Sky at Night’, a long-running BBC TV astronomy show, died yesterday, December 9, aged 89. Although Sir Patrick Moore's name is perhaps not automatically associated with scale models, in fact it was through modelling that I first met Patrick Moore more than 40 years ago, when I supplied some spacecraft miniatures to The Sky at Night, a connection that continued on and off until the present day. I don’t think anyone would deny that Patrick was the world’s most famous amateur astronomer, for he was a professional broadcaster, but an amateur astronomer in the true sense of the term. Through The Sky at Night, he inspired countless people, many of whom went on to become professional astronomers, space scientists, or were given a lifetime interest in the subject. It would be difficult to put a figure on these numbers, though I know I was one of them. Patrick in The Sky at Night studio ( above ) around the lat...