24 April: The Sky at Night

This date in 1957 saw the first broadcast of astronomy programme The Sky at Night. 10 things you might not know about this show:

1. It was Patrick Moore’s idea. The evidence for this is in a series of letters between him and Paul Johnstone, a TV producer. Moore had made a documentary for the BBC about whether flying saucers exist. While waiting to find out if this programme had been a success, he wrote to Johnstone with some suggestions, including having a radar expert on TV to show that other things can cause unexplained radar blips, making the point it would be good visually. In the same letter, Moore said he was sure it was only a matter of time before someone produced a “Stars of the Month programme” which he also thought would be good television, and was already popular on Radio. In fact, he was pretty much pitching the idea and said that if the BBC weren’t interested, he would approach the other channel. Johnstone replied to say he’d put it to the planners and Moore would definitely be in the running to present such a show, but it depended “firstly on your performance in the flying Saucers programme and secondly, on your not deciding to go to ITA in the meantime.”
2. The original working title was "Star Map".
3. Patrick Moore presented the programme from the first episode until his death in December 2012 – making him the longest running host of the same TV programme ever.
4. He’s not the only long standing feature of the show to make the record books. It’s also the show holding the record for having the same theme tune for the longest time. That theme music is At the Castle Gate, from the incidental music to Pelléas et Mélisande, written in 1905 by Jean Sibelius, performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham.
5. Guests on the show have included Harlow Shapley (the first to measure the size of the Milky Way galaxy), Fred Hoyle, Carl Sagan, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Arthur C Clarke, Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees, Michael Bentine, Wernher von Braun, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Brian May, the Queen guitarist and astrophysicist.
6. The show has an Asteroid named after it. On the show’s 50^th anniversary The International Astronomical Union named an asteroid 57424 Caelumnoctu, the number referring to the first broadcast date and the name being Latin for "The Sky at Night".
7. The 50th Anniversary edition of the show was a special "time travel" edition which included the appearance of Jon Culshaw as Moore's younger self. It was filmed at Teddington Studios as Lime Grove Studios, where the first show was made, had been demolished in 1992.
8. In 2013 the show was moved from BBC1 to BBC Four. The BBC had announced that the programme's future was under review; fans feared it was gong to be axed and started a petition to save it. While the move might be seen by some as a downgrade, on the up side, after the move it was 10 minutes longer, the broadcast time increasing from 20 minutes to 30.
9. When Patrick Moore died, two new presenters took over: Dr Lucie Green, the show’s first ever female presenter, a Royal Society University Research Fellow whose day job is studying immense magnetic structures in the sun’s atmosphere; and Professor Chris Lintott, initially recruited as a researcher, then as a reporter and co-presenter. Chris’s day job is at the University of Oxford, where he recruits people to work on tasks like discovering supernovae or classifying galaxies. This team would be joined, after a few months, by Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who has worked on the Gemini telescope in Chile and the James Webb Space telescope, and has presented children’s astronomy programmes. She wanted to be an astronaut as a child, and is still hopeful that her dream of travelling to outer space will come true. She said, “I want to retire to Mars. Some people choose gardening, I choose Mars!” The fourth member of the team is Pete Lawrence, who has an honours degree in Physics with Astrophysics, whose day job is computer software development, and is an expert on using digital cameras for astrophotography. He once said, “One of the problems that I have when I'm looking at Uranus is that there's something much more tempting very close by.”
10. Why has this show been so popular for so long? Patrick Moore once explained it thus: "Astronomy's a fascinating subject. You look up... you can't help getting interested and it's there. We've tried to bring it to the people.. it's not me, it's the appeal of the subject."

See also: Night sky

Character birthday

Silverstreak. He was a petty thief, mostly to fund his drug habit. He was offered a large fee to break into a high security installation to steal a prototype suit of power armour with a rocket pack. He jumped at the chance. Those paying him instructed him to use the armour to escape, knowing it would have little fuel in it, and Ronnie would fall to his death before getting very far, whereupon they would retrieve it. Ronnie, however, overheard them discussing the plan and knew to also steal some fuel and top up the tank before escaping. He found flying to be the ultimate high and was able to give up drugs. He was pursued relentlessly by the gang for some time, but eventually, he killed them all in self defence – but by the time they were all gone, he'd developed a taste for violent crime. Soon after this, he joined Combat Team Omega.