I was just 3.5 years old when Neil Armstrong stepped on to the lunar surface. Yet I can still vividly remember watching those ghostly monochrome images of humanity's first contact with another world, live on the TV screen. I think that was the spark which lighted my subsequent interest in space and astronomy.

I can trace my interest in astronomical observation to Christmas 1975 when my class teacher gave me a small illustrated Ladybird book The Stars and their Legends as a Christmas present. The other children received books on various other subjects and hobbies, but I will be forever thankful to the lovely Mrs Dutton for her gift -- otherwise I may have become a collector of lepidoptera or (even worse) a keen knitter!

Anyhow, in the winter of 1975-76 I spent the clear evenings identifying some of the various constellations mentioned in the book - it really was an absolute thrill to spot Orion the Hunter, Taurus the Bull and Lepus the Hare! Before long I wanted to see more of the heavens than my naked eye alone could discern. I spent my 1976 summer holiday savings on a small, rather imperfect hand-held telescope. What a joy it was to be able to see the Moon's craters, albeit rather indistinctly.

Around this time a friend allowed me to use his father's big binoculars to look at the Moon -- I was astounded at such a superb sight. I even imagined I had discovered an alien lunar base, but when I learned about the Moon in later years, my ET base turned out to be the diamond shaped Palus Somni (Marsh of Sleep).

Solar folly

In 1976 I made a Sun filter from of the tinted lenses of several pairs of cheap plastic sunglasses and subsequently burned the centre of the retina of my right eye when I tried to view the Sun through my telescope. To this day my eyesight is impaired at the centre of my right eye's field of view. The moral of this tale is obvious -- the Sun is a dangerous object. Looking at the Sun without the proper precautions will do to your sensitive retina what a pint of concentrated bleach will do to your stomach lining. Please, don't take any chances with your vision!

Space discovery

On 24 November 1980 I swung my 40 mm refractor towards the Orion Nebula and discerned the wispy nebulosity and the small cluster of stars within it known as the Trapezium. The following month in the wee small hours of 27 December 1980 I independently discovered Jupiter, the Galilean satellites and the ringed planet Saturn. I soon got into the habit of making observational drawings and have kept an astronomical observing log since the early days. I am currently approaching my 1,400th logged observation.

Scopes

Like most of us, I've owned and used a variety of telescopes over the years. For years (the first half of the 1980s) I solely used an altazimuth-mounted 60 mm achromat (Vixen) which I still use from time to time on the Moon and Sun. Among my other current telescopes is the late, great Harold Hill's 8-inch SCT (Dynamax), which I bought from Harold a number of years ago and renovated. I also have another 8-inch SCT (Meade LX90, my 'workhorse' telescope), a 100mm go-to achromat (Celestron NexStar SLT 102, an ideal portable instrument), and a 17.5-inch Newtonian (Coulter Odyssey). I've made several telescopes too, including grinding and polishing the mirrors of two 6-inch Newtonians (f/4.5 and f/11) and a 12-inch Newtonian (f/4.5), and I still use the latter two to this day.