Background & astronomy interests

I’ve had a lifelong interest in astronomy and space science but its only been my main hobby since around 2012. Professionally, my career was in the NHS as a biomedical scientist, medical data acquisition specialist and software developer. Many of my professional skills have turned out to be valuable in my astronomical interests.

Following completion of the one year ‘Introduction to Astronomy’ course with the University of Central Lancashire I became interested in astrophysics, in particular, stellar evolution and life cycle of stars. What I also learnt about stellar classification got me interested in spectroscopy and that has been my main focus of observational work for the last few years.

Locale constraints impact my sky visibility/quality and require nightly setup so I limit myself to a low resolution spectroscopy setup. This consists of a Celestron NexStar Evolution 8 Alt/Az scope with a ZWO ASI183MMPro camera and Star Analyser 200 grating for spectro work.

I use tools such as the TopCat app to access data in a variety of scientific databases such as SIMBAD, AAVSO and those fed by platforms such as GAIA and JWST. Where necessary I also write custom Python code to query them.