The Times We Lived In: ‘Any sign of the dark side, Minister?’

T ricky things, telescopes. You peer in, and you peer in, and dammit if you can’t see anything except your own big old worried-looking head peering back at you.

On the other hand, if you need a lesson in how to get your eye in, then who better than Sir Patrick Moore himself – stargazer and telly legend extraordinaire – to give you a leg up?

Our photo was taken at the opening of a scientific exhibition in Birr, Co Offaly. In those days he was just Plain Patrick Moore, director of the Armagh Planetarium. His particular interest was our nearest neighbour the moon, on the subject of which he had written several books, including a Young Adult adventure romp.

So maybe what he’s saying to the putative astronomer on the right of the picture is something along the lines of, “Any sign of the dark side, Minister?”

This star-gazer is, of course, Brian Lenihan, Minister for Education at the time, who would, in the years to come, have plenty of opportunity to observe the dark side (of politics, rather than satellites) at close hand.

Moore’s stay in Ireland was brief. Appointed in 1965 to oversee the construction of the new planetarium in Armagh, he found the divided society in the North oppressive and resigned as soon as the planetarium opened, about three months after this picture was taken. Before he left, however, he helped to restore Birr’s Great Telescope, built by the Third Earl of Rosse in the 1840s, and the largest in the world for nearly a century. It’s not clear from the caption whether this venerable scientific instrument is the one in our photo, though it certainly looks old and bashed-up enough to have survived many nights of exposure to outer space.

Sadly, neither Patrick Moore nor Brian Lenihan is to be glimpsed in the 21st-century cosmos. But Armagh Planetarium and the Science Centre at Birr Castle are still with us, and are terrific places to visit – for stargazers of all ages and abilities.