Heavenly bodies

After taking on the observatory, Moore gave a dishonest date of birth in order to fly in the Second World War a year before he was of age. After the war he moved to the West Sussex coast of England and there he has remained, with his homemade observatory, relentlessly studying the night sky and doing more than any other individual to help us understand the celestial bodies that inhabit it.

Academically, he is respected as an expert on the Moon – so much so that his lunar mapping has been used by both the Soviets and NASA. He speaks fluent French and enough Norwegian to “get by”. He holds the world record for the longest serving television presenter for his show, The Sky At Night (first aired in 1957). As if that weren’t enough, the show’s subject, astronomy, is hardly an easy sell for modern popular culture. Not afraid to combat the stuffy science stereotype, he has parodied himself many times – and what a character to parody; his rapid, old-fashioned diction and trademark monocle are easily recognisable. In music, he is an accomplished xylophone player, has composed his own works and once played a duet with Albert Einstein, Moore on a piano, Einstein on a violin. A great man of many accomplishments shares his views.

Nice to talk to you, it’s just Patrick – no-one ever called me Sir Patrick! Haha!

I know the exact moment. My mother was always vaguely interested and had some books on it. I picked up a small book belonging to her called The Story of the Solar System, and there it is (he gestures towards a shelf packed with textbooks, their spines labelled with the stickers of a home-made filing system). I was just seven and a half years old, and it was not a boys’ book, but my reading was all right. I read it through and thought, “this is interesting, I’ll follow this up”.

Well, first of all I did a bit more reading and got the basic things. I then went out at night and learnt my way around the sky, which doesn’t take long you know. I then bought a pair of binoculars and used those. And then thought; “well this really is interesting.” I was then thinking about a telescope, and I got one, it’s in the hall there (gesturing again). I went on from there, simple as that.

I had several bits of luck. For one thing, I lived then in East Grinstead, in Sussex, and opposite us was a big estate run by a man named Mr Hamley. In his garden he had a small observatory, Brookhurst observatory, and the astronomer was W. S. Franks.

Franks took me on, showed me how to work everything and allowed me to go there with him when I was a boy. Then Franks suddenly died, which was very sad, and Hamley gave me the shock of my life saying “You’re 13, my astronomer is dead, would you run my observatory for me?”

So, suddenly, I found myself running a small observatory, which I did right up until the war. Then of course the war came and everything went.

It’s all around us and there are things we don’t understand, things we want to understand – they’re looking at us, you can’t mistake it. When you start inquiring, you want to go on – at least, I did.

Actually, I had more time than most boys because of, between the age of 5 and 15, I was laid low by a heart illness so there were things I couldn’t do then.

What can mankind hope to learn from star-gazing?

Astronomy is really the basis of all time-keeping and navigation, to start with. And you can’t separate astronomy from any other branch of science. Some people have tried to do that but the fact is that you can’t, it’s all there! You always come back to it in the end.

My subject was the Moon, my only real contribution was in Moon mapping – I stayed close to home.

We’ve done a great deal. I thought by now we probably would have done more. After all, the point was of course that in those days there was a Cold War going on and there was no collaboration between the two great powers, America and Russia. Well now there is.

People think things have slowed down. In a way they have, and in a way they haven’t. So far as manned research is concerned, yes, they have most certainly.

But unmanned research, now, think what’s been happening with various space telescopes – The Spitzer telescope for example – and they’re all sending observations back all the time.

I’ve spent 10 years writing my big data book on astronomy, which Cambridge are publishing. And I’ve had to update it, and I’ve now had to update the updates. It’s amazing, every week you look through and think, “that’s got to be updated now”. I’ve got it, to make changes to, until the end of this month and then I can’t do more I’m afraid!

It depends entirely upon ourselves. At the moment, the world is not united, and unless we become united we’ll get nowhere. It depends on the way we choose our political leaders. I must say, thinking about the present world leaders inspires me with a feeling of no confidence at all.

I know one thing, in five years time the world won’t be the same place as it is now; it’ll either be far better, or far worse. It won’t be the same. You’ll see it, I won’t.

Do you think we’ll ever colonise Mars?
Technically, we can do it now, but with radiation we can’t. You’re going to spend weeks in space unprotected, and so far, we’ve no way to solve the radiation problem. And until we can do that, we won’t get to Mars. Then again, going beyond Mars, where next? Well, we have so far to go. Of one thing, I am certain; we talk about planets of other stars, Kepler (a space telescope) has just found an Earth-like planet, and they are light-years away – we are never going to get there by means we know today. Rockets won’t do it, nothing will.

There’s got to be some fundamental breakthrough about which we can’t even discuss now because we haven’t any idea of it. Space-warps, time-warps, babel fish, thought-travel… that’s all pure science-fiction… but television would have been science-fiction a couple of hundred years ago. There’s got to be some fundamental breakthrough, until we manage that we are not going to get to the stars. But it could happen.