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1. Influences on Johnny Mackintosh: Carl Sagan

The very first episode of Cosmos should have hooked anybody:

“We will encounter galaxies and suns and planets, life and consciousness coming into being, evolving and perishing. Worlds of ice and stars of diamond, atoms as massive as suns and universes smaller than atoms … The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From it, we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen out toes or, at most, wet our ankles. The water seems inviting. The ocean calls. Some part of our being knows this is from where we came. We long to return.”

Here was a scientist who was also a poet – a slightly cheesy poet maybe, but definitely a great communicator of “awesome” ideas.

Cosmos was a TV series first transmitted in the UK at the start of the 1980s. Sagan’s definition was “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be” so it had quite a wide remit. In the show, the American professor traversed the Cosmos in his “spaceship of the imagination”, a dandelion seed that he would blow on – the next moment he was inside, hair streaming in a non-existent breeze, hands waving over multi-coloured controls while he quoted from the Encyclopedia Gallactica. In this remarkable vessel Sagan traversed the universe, past and present. Readers of Johnny Mackintosh should recognize elements of this description and understand that Emperor Bram Khari bears a striking resemblance to the cosmologist from Cornell.

I always felt meeting Sagan was a highlight of my time at Cambridge University. He came to give a talk on the new theory of nuclear winter, the idea of which had come out of studying volcanoes on Mars. Afterwards I spoke to him and he signed by (battered) copy of Cosmos that I’d taken along.

When Brian Cox first started doing his Wonders of the Solar System TV  programme I was determined not to like it because I thought nothing could compete with Cosmos, but I quickly changed my mind when I saw how superbly put together Wonders was – not another dumbed down trite computer-graphics-laden programme but something of real substance, and I could see Sagan’s influence shining through. I first met Cox at the Royal Society and we talked about our shared love of Cosmos. Later, in the second series of Wonders, I found it funny  to see that the Manchester and CERN professor had carried his battered copy of Cosmos on location and referred to the photograph of the Anasazi rock painting, possibly depicting the supernova of 1054, that he’d first seen on this wonderful TV series from the 1980s.

Sagan didn’t only write and present nonfiction – though we should remember his fact was often far more extraordinary than most made-up traveller’s tales. If you ever saw the Jodie Foster movie

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2. Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2010

The Royal Observatory at Greenwich is a magical place. It houses London’s only planetarium, together with some great spacey exhibits. It’s also where east properly meets west at the Prime Meridian, and home to a wonderful array of telescopes, as well as a splendid earthly view looking out towards Canary Wharf. Finally, you can get there via the Docklands Light Railway which means, if you’re very lucky, you can sit in the front of the front carriage and pretend you’re driving the train out to it.

The daytime view from the Royal Observatory

On Thursday I was lucky enough to be invited there for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year Awards 2010 (thanks to my friend Anna who worked on a series of astrophotography Tutorials to accompany the exhibition). I’m fortunate that in my day job (when I’m not writing Johnny Mackintosh books) I get to travel the world, going to many scientific conferences, so can reveal that all the other scientists are jealous of astronomers because of their beautiful photographs and the way they can capture the public’s imagination.

Fuel Cell Photo, courtesy Avni Argun and Nathan Ashcraft, MIT

The Horsehead Nebula

Would you rather look at this MIT photo of a new fuel cell membrane (of course enormously important research) or of the Horsehead Nebula? However important the science, it’s no contest really. This Horsehead Nebula image won the 2009 Competition for amateur astronomer Martin Pugh. It helps show that, even now in the twenty-first century, amateurs can and do make a great contribution to this particular science.

There were several categories:

Earth & Space

Our Solar System

Deep Space

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