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IN 1984, when I was living in Los Angeles, a friend dragged me along
to a meeting of the Orange County Astronomical Society. I don’t know what
I expected: a dozen spotty teenagers, I suppose, enthusing about globular
star clusters, sporadic meteors and equatorial mounts. What I got was something
else entirely: an auditorium packed to bursting point with 200 people of
all ages, from all walks of life. These so-called ‘amateur astronomers’
built 28-inch telescopes, equipped them with the latest CCD detectors and
controlled them with computers. They invited eminent astrophysicists to
run workshops on the newest developments in telescope technology and published
the proceedings in the form of books. Never since, have I underestimated
amateur astronomers.

In Britain, apparently, there are around 3000 astronomy enthusiasts.
At least, that’s what I learnt from Earth Calling Basingstoke, a documentary
in Channel 4’s science series, Equinox. The programme focuses on a sample
of ordinary people who keep their eyes (not to mention a battery of sophisticated
home-made instruments) glued to the sky.

Take Henry Hatfield, for instance. He’s a retired naval commander from
Sevenoaks in Kent. Through a hole in the wall of his home, he observes the
Sun at optical wavelenths. ‘Tuning in to Radio Hydrogen-alpha,’ he calls
it.

Hatfield started out with only a lens. The focal length of the lens,
18 feet, determined the size of the room in which he mounted it; the size
of the room, in turn, determined the size of his house. ‘It’s the only house
ever built around a spectrohelioscope,’ he says. Hatfield tunes in to the
Sun’s radio emission, too. Examining a spike on a chart recorder, he shakes
his head. ‘Probably my wife with the Hoover,’ he says.

John Wall of Dartford in Kent is a retired draughtsman. He gets more
enjoyment out of building astronomical instruments than out of actually
doing astronomy. ‘Engineering sculpture’, he calls it. In a bedroom, cluttered
with home-built telescopes, he lovingly uncovers a 32-inch mirror which
took him two years to grind smooth. He talks carefully, in case his spit
should create a microscopic pit on its perfect surface. ‘Once I broke a
mirror,’ he confides. ‘It was very traumatic. It took me weeks to get over
it.’ In his basement, Wall has built an electrostatic generator. He’s experimenting
with artificial lightning.

Denis Buczynski is a butcher by day. Most cloudless nights, though,
he’s at the observatory he built with a friend, searching distant galaxies
for supernovae. In a year, he says, he can search around 3000 galaxies.
He reckons that that gives him a good chance of catching one. ‘Being useful,’
he says, ‘that’s the pleasure in it for me. Astronomy is still an area where
the amateur can make a contribution that’s valuable.’

John Fletcher, a postman from Gloucester, also spends his nights on
‘supernova patrol’. No one in Britain has ever caught a star in the act
of blowing itself apart but it’s the ultimate prize for amateurs and professionals
alike. Fletcher, who is divorced, is willing to make sacrifices in his quest.
‘I gave up socialising nine years ago,’ he says. ‘When the sky’s clear,
everything goes except astronomy. My telescope’s my best friend.’

Dave Graham, an electrician who lives in Brompton-on-Swale (wherever
that may be), comes up with the best definition of his species. ‘Astronomy
to me,’ he says, ‘is at the eye-end of a telescope.’

And there you have it.

The professionals haven’t been at the ‘eye-end’ of a telescope for a
century or more, ever since that instant when the photographic plate superseded
the naked eye. And, nowadays, even the photographic plate has been superseded
in its turn. No longer do the professionals ‘look’ through telescopes. Today’s
astronomy is all voltage read-outs from electronic detectors and number-crunching
on big computers. No one would deny that great strides have been made in
the subject but perhaps a little of the romance has gone along the way.

For a short time, I was a professional astronomer. My biggest disappointment,
though, was that I never got to see with my own eyes the multicoloured galaxies
and nebulae that had so delighted me as a child on opening an astronomy
book. Amateur astronomers still know that delight. They live in the romantic
age of astronomy and for that I envy them. If you tune in to Earth Calling
Basingstoke, perhaps you will, too.