Astronomy In England

Some of you may have noticed (though most of you probably have not) that I've not posted any astrophotography shots since February (here's one).

Well, there's a reason for that and that reason is this:
I live in England.

Friday night is Observatory Night.
It has been cloudy, foggy or pissing down with rain every single Friday since February.
It's been raining here solidly for two weeks now.
It is the stinkiest pisser of an alleged spring on record.

Shakespeare, probably our greatest Englishman and one who - staging his plays in an open air theatre - would have had occasion to glance up at the English sky from time to time, wrote "For the rain it raineth every day."

Bill Bryson, who, for reasons best known to himself, has settled down just across the river from me, says that looking up at the sky here is "like living in Tupperware."

Except it's a lot wetter.

 This year the rain it raineth every bloody Friday night, and in particular it raineth on the heads of astronomers, forcing us to sit, night after night in the lecture theatre, drinking endless cups of bad coffee and talking rubbish.
Last night I glumly took these photographs before grumbling my way indoors, brewing up a stinking brown mess in the kitchen and then moaning about the weather to the soundtrack of the clickety clack of a bunch of miserable old codgers in the "telescope mirror grinding room" (which contains … er … a pool table) and wondering if there will ever be another clear Friday night.

The past week and a half has seen our Spring Star Party, where a whole bunch of us (though luckily not me) had a thoroughly dispiriting  time sitting, shivering in soaking, freezing tents in the middle of nowhere up in North Norfolk being lashed with gales and torrential rain.
Last night, as I helped them unpack their dripping wet gear from the van they seemed remarkably chipper about it all. Over here, it seems, astronomy is not so much about looking at the stars, it's more about hope … the hope that one day before we die we might get the chance to actually see something in the sky other than water.


Welcome to astronomy in England.