Hope you managed to catch the BBC Stargazing live shows in January. With Major Tim Peake’s stay on ISS already a month old, the emphasis was very much on the work he is doing, astronaut training, and the future direction of manned space flight.

The ‘space walk’ special was particularly informative, especially with Commander Chris Hadfield (the one who sang Space Oddity on the ISS) on hand at Jodrell giving very insightful explanations and opinions.

Chris Lintott’s public science project was also a winner, discovering potential Pulsar signals by trawling through online graph data, looking for the right kind of radio signatures. They were hoping to get a million ‘hits’, they got over 3 million, (over 500 were mine!) with numerous new pulsar candidates being unearthed, one of which was actually picked up by the Lovell radio telescope at Jodrell.

I did feel sorry for the local astronomical society (Macclesfield), who turned out with their scopes each episode, only to be rained off or clouded out. We share their frustrations, one of those Januaries.