Nearly Famous

A near brush with astro-fame!

I was contacted out of the blue on Twitter by a production staffer of the BBC in London, who had spotted my image of the Southern polar region sky on the portfolio page of my "Cosmic Focus" website.

@Ggreybeard Hi, I work on a BBC astronomy show.We would like to discuss maybe using one of your pics. Please email v******a.w****r@bbc.co.uk

— Tori Weaver (@toriweaver) March 16, 2017

She informed me that they had been searching for an image of the Southern Sky which they could use to show diagrammatically how to use the Pointers and the Southern Cross to locate the South Celestial Pole, for us on the programme "Stargazing Live".

I was requested to sign a release form for them to use the image for that purpose - which I did - and there was a couple of weeks wait before the show. I reckoned there was a 50:50 chance of it being used.

Breaking my own page formatting rules, here is my image, taken from The Oaks, NSW, on a Macarthur Astronomical Society field night in 2013:

image © R.Powell

Sadly, they decided not to use my image in the Australian ABC version of "Stargazing Live".

In a fit of madness :) the producers instead lined up a group of onlookers holding bright lamps to form an artificial version of the constellations instead.

Screen image © ABC/BBC

Then I went to look at the BBC version of the "Stargazing Live" programme which had been aired a week or so before the Australian programme - and twenty-four minutes into the second of three shows I found they had used an image but unfortunately it wasn't mine :( 

Screen image ©  BBC & It's Just A Ride?

So near, yet so far!