By Fred Watson

A LONG TIME AGO, when I was a spotty-faced teenager, my dad took me to a very old manor house not far from our home in the north of England. The building was close to where he worked, and he had guessed that its empty, neglected state made it ripe for demolition - a fate which, indeed, it suffered soon afterwards, to the shame of the local authority.

So why did he take me there? You'd think that a youngster who was already hooked on space and astronomy would have little time for dusty old buildings. But I was enchanted by our impromptu tour. My dad had heard that two and a half centuries earlier, this place had been the home of a famous astronomer, Abraham Sharp (1651-1742), an assistant to England's first Astronomer Royal. And its now-crumbling central tower had formed his observatory, crowned with a balustraded platform from which he could observe the sky with the crude telescopes of the day. This was real astronomy, and it was spine-tingling stuff for a star-struck kid.

Read the rest of this article in the February/March issue of Australian Sky & Telescope.