Marnie explains how a childhood under the stars, a total solar eclipse and a chicken coop in Terry Hills led her to build Australia’s dark sky movement. She covers dark sky places, a Guinness World Record, a petition to federal parliament, and why light pollution harms wildlife, pollinators and human health. She also describes the Virtual Solar System Drive audio tour near Siding Spring Observatory and Coonabarabran, and why Australia is the best place on Earth for a first astrotourism trip.

Fred then traces his remarkable career: from Sputnik and the Great Melbourne Telescope’s makers in England to the 3.9-metre Anglo-Australian Telescope, where he pioneered optical fibre spectroscopy that lets astronomers study many stars and galaxies at once. He tells the story of Hans Lipperhey and the unsung Leonard Digges, the day Pluto’s demotion upset the Solar System Drive’s signage, and why “What was before the Big Bang?” is the question that still stumps us. He also talks about Asteroid 5691 Fred Watson, his music and his APRA award, his concerns about Starlink satellite constellations, and the total solar eclipse of 22 July 2028 that astronomers are calling AWE, the Australia-Wide Eclipse.

Chapters

• Welcome and Acknowledgement of Country
• A First for Astrophiz: Meet Marnie Ogg and Fred Watson
• Marnie Ogg: A Childhood Under the Stars and the Birth of Astrotourism
• Astrotourism Around the World: Asiago, Venice, and the Emu and the Llama in the Sky
• Why Australia’s Dark Skies Are Worth Protecting: From Berlin to a Chicken Coop in Terry Hills
• Inside the Australasian Dark Sky Alliance: Dark Sky Places, a Guinness World Record and a Petition to Parliament
• Why Light Pollution Matters: Wildlife, Pollinators and Circadian Rhythms
• The Virtual Solar System Drive Audio Tour at Siding Spring and Coonabarabran
• Marnie’s Advice for a First Astrotourism Trip
• Over to Fred Watson: A Career from Sputnik to the Anglo-Australian Telescope
• Life on a Mountain: Working at the Anglo-Australian Telescope and the Problem of Atmospheric Turbulence
• Fibre Optics and Multi-Object Spectrographs: From FLAIR and Panache to Starbugs
• Stargazer: Hans Lipperhey, the Birth of the Telescope and the Unsung Leonard Digges
• Building the Virtual Solar System Drive and Pluto’s Demotion
• The Question Fred Gets Asked Most: What Was Before the Big Bang?
• Asteroid 5691 Fred Watson and Stargazing Live with Brian Cox
• Fred’s Other Passion: Music, Ross Edwards and an APRA Award
• Fred’s Rant: Starlink, Satellite Constellations and the Threat to Ground-Based Astronomy
• What to Watch: The Total Solar Eclipse of 22 July 2028
• Farewell and Astrophiz Sign-Off

Transcript

Welcome and Acknowledgement of Country

Brendan: Welcome to episode 246 of Astrophiz. My name is Brendan O’Brien, and this episode of Astrophiz is produced on Yorta Yorta, Pangarang and Gadigal Country.

We celebrate and honour the first astronomers of this land, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Twice monthly, we explore the universe with the world’s leading scientists. For transcripts and more, visit astrophiz.com.

And today, I’m speaking with two guests at once: Professor Fred Watson and Marnie Ogg, two wonderful space nuts who have literally changed our view of both the beauty and our understanding of the night skies.

So join me now as we zoom up to Sydney.

A First for Astrophiz: Meet Marnie Ogg and Fred Watson

Brendan: Hello, Fred and Marnie.

Fred and Marnie: Hello, Brendan.

Brendan: Today, listeners, this is a first for Astrophiz. I’m thrilled to be speaking with two guests at once.

Marnie Ogg is the founder of the Australasian Dark Sky Alliance, which does amazing work, and she is also the director of Dark Sky Traveller. She’s spent nearly 30 years connecting people with the night sky in more than 80 countries.

And seated beside Marnie is Professor Fred Watson. Fred is Australia’s astronomer at large, a much-loved author and broadcaster, and a prolific research astronomer whose long and brilliant career has been closely tied to the Anglo-Australian Telescope up at Siding Spring.

Fred and Marnie are partners in life and have a shared passion for dark skies. They’ve also worked together on the audio tour of the Virtual Solar System Drive near Coonabarabran, a concept Fred helped develop as a member of the original committee many years ago.

Marnie and Fred, welcome to Astrophiz.

Marnie: Thanks, Brendan.

Fred: Yeah, wonderful to be here.

Brendan: Excellent. Okay, thanks. Now, first a message for our listeners, not an ad. This is a double interview. I’ve never done this before. So for the sake of clarity and continuity, I’m going to throw a few questions to Marnie first. Then we’ll throw the spotlight on to Fred.

Marnie Ogg: A Childhood Under the Stars and the Birth of Astrotourism

Brendan: So first up, I’m delighted to be speaking with Marnie Ogg, founder of the Australasian Dark Sky Alliance and director of Dark Sky Traveller. Marnie, welcome to Astrophiz.

Marnie: Thank you. It’s really nice to be able to talk about this wonderful subject with you.

Brendan: Thank you. Excellent. Now, before we get to dark skies and dark sky parks and reserves and communities, could you tell us where you grew up, Marnie, and how you began and ended up building a career where tourism and science meet? I understand you’ve been at it for nearly 30 years?

Marnie: Yeah, look, I guess the dark sky tourism stuff has been going for about 20 years, and it was really fostered by my father. He was a vet by trade, but he always had an interest in astronomy.

Our family holidays were often going out looking at the stars if we were camping or even in rural areas. My dad was a vet in Kununurra. He was a flying vet for a while there. He was always looking up to the night sky and he’d say, “That’s the ecliptic. You’ve got the planets and the sun and all in a line.”

I guess I had a love of the outdoors at night that perhaps most children didn’t usually get. I was never frightened of the dark.

I was in travel and tourism for several years. In fact, I was taking tours up through Nepal, doing a trek and also working in some of the orphanages up there with groups of people that I was putting together. As lovely as that work was, it was never making money.

I was at the point of closing down my travel business when my father came back from a total solar eclipse with my mother and said, “Did you know that there’s a total solar eclipse in six years’ time? Maybe you should invite Fred Watson to be your host and you could do an astronomy tour.”

And voila, there we are. That was the start of astrotourism with Marnie and Fred together. So, yeah, that was kind of the beginning.

Brendan: Fantastic. What a lovely start.

Astrotourism Around the World: Asiago, Venice, and the Emu and the Llama in the Sky

Brendan: You and Fred have visited astronomy destinations in more than 80 countries. Now, let’s do some cherry picking. Could you tell us about one place that’s really stuck with you, and what did you learn about how different cultures connect with the night sky?

Marnie: Wow. Look, it’s hard to choose because everywhere you go there’s a different cultural connection to the night sky, and even just a different environmental connection to the night sky.

As you ask me that question, my immediate thoughts go to two places. One is Italy, where we were very fortunate to get into the Asiago Observatory. Fred had an affiliation with one of the telescopes and several colleagues working there.

We had a bit of an adventure getting our group of travellers up to the telescope in the first place, because our bus was too long to get up the very narrow and curvy roads. When we got to the top, of course, it was all fogged in and clouded in. There was nothing we could have seen through the telescope, even if it had been a clear night.

But coming back down the mountain that night, Venice was below us. The extraordinary amount of light pollution that this national optical telescope would have had to deal with to do any sort of research there just shocked me.

It made me realise just how lucky we are in Australia to have such beautiful dark skies. I guess that was my draw card initially into why we should be preserving dark skies in Australia.

Then, just as a brief anecdote, there are the telescopes that we visited in Chile, which are obviously spectacular, the leading telescopes of the world. Fred can talk more about their scientific significance.

But the thing I realised there was this. As Indigenous Australians see an emu in the sky, we were taught that South Americans, the Chileans and the Peruvians, actually see a llama in the sky. That cultural difference is fascinating: still seeing the dark matter in the universe in the Milky Way, but seeing what’s culturally appropriate for your area. So those two moments were very significant for me.

Brendan: That is so cool.

Why Australia’s Dark Skies Are Worth Protecting: From Berlin to a Chicken Coop in Terry Hills

Brendan: Now, I understand it was an astrotourism event that you were hosting in Europe that made you realise how very special Australia’s dark skies are. What was it that you saw or heard that made you think, “We have something extraordinary here that needs protecting”?

Marnie: Well, I guess it was a combination of that event in Asiago, but probably a culmination of events, really.

Standing in London and seeing, even on a clear night, no more than three or four stars. Going out to places in Germany and thinking, “This is the best dark sky that they’ve got.” Sometimes there isn’t terribly much light pollution around, but if you look at a light pollution map, and one of the best resources for that is the website lightpollutionmap.info, you can compare all the light-polluted cities around the world and see just how impacted the Northern Hemisphere is.

I think we were in Berlin and we’d gone out looking for the stars, and of course that was pretty difficult.

Then it was actually coming back to Australia. At the time we were living on the fringe of Sydney, in a town called Terry Hills, and we had chickens there. I came back from putting the chickens in their coop at night and looked up at the night sky and thought, “This is better than anything we’ve ever seen on any of our travels in the Northern Hemisphere. Who’s doing something to protect it? Because this is really special.”

That was a culmination of a couple of years’ travel to some of the places that were apparently the best in the Northern Hemisphere to see the stars. We never saw anything as good as I was seeing it in my own backyard.

Brendan: Yeah, so true. In my case, my home in rural Victoria is a nice portal to the sky, very dark. But recently a 24-hour concrete factory has opened up 30 kilometres away, and it is so bright it makes me mad.

Inside the Australasian Dark Sky Alliance: Dark Sky Places, a Guinness World Record and a Petition to Parliament

Brendan: So, all that led you to establish the Australasian Dark Sky Alliance. Can you tell us what ADSA does? How did you build it? And what are you most proud of so far in all the achievements of ADSA?

Marnie: Look, I’m very proud of the organisation. I think we’ve come a long way in the seven years that it’s existed, including three years during COVID. In fact, COVID may have been a bit of a blessing for dark skies in Australia.

It started as an organisation that came together after the first dark sky conference that I held at Siding Spring Observatory, home to Australia’s first dark sky place, which Fred and I were able to put through literally 10 years ago this year.

I decided to invite astronomers, researchers, industry and community groups to come together. We realised there were actually a lot of people doing dark sky work around Australia, but doing it individually and fighting the same fights over and over with communities or councils. So we decided to group those people together, form a board, create an organisation, and off we went.

Initially it was just an education and awareness-raising organisation. We wanted to put dark skies on the map: have it on radio, talk about it, run some events, literally start a national awareness campaign and bring all the voices together.

That has happened with not one but two dark sky conferences. It has also happened with a Guinness World Record attempt that took place not only in Australia but around the world, with 14,000 people signing up. We successfully achieved the Guinness World Record for the most people doing a dark sky sustainability course in a 24-hour period. Because it was during COVID, it all had to be online, but nevertheless we brought that voice together.

Last year that culminated in a petition to federal parliament to legislate light pollution mitigation, or at least to investigate how that would come into place. Unfortunately, the petition was not successful. It was reviewed by Minister Watt, and they came back and said that at this stage they’re not in a position to do anything.

But nevertheless, it’s quite a big deal to have had that conversation raised in Parliament. The more times we put up our hand and ask for change, the more likely we are to get it.

I see that happening with the ripple effect: the number of dark sky places being created around Australia, which is now 10, and the number of councils implementing light management plans. Even CSIRO, and I’m going to put in a shameless plug here, recently published, as in two weeks ago, my book for children on light pollution.

So we’ve got that momentum happening in Australia now, and I think it’s largely due to the fact that a very passionate group of seven ADSA board members came together and really drove that message forward. So yes, it’s something I’m very proud of.

Brendan: Congratulations, and it’s great to see that it’s having some positive effects.

Why Light Pollution Matters: Wildlife, Pollinators and Circadian Rhythms

Brendan: For listeners who haven’t thought much about it, why does light pollution matter? Beyond making it harder for astronomers and stargazers to see the Milky Way, what can ordinary people do about it in their own street or town?

Marnie: Look, I think one of the most positive messages we have about light pollution is that it’s something everybody can do something about, and immediately make a big impact.

We know the impacts of plastic. It’s foreign matter that wasn’t in our world 100 years ago, not naturally, nothing like it. And we’ve basically done the same thing with light.

If you think about it, light at night is foreign. The most common light at night up until 150 years ago was basically moonlight, starlight and potentially fire. Those were natural forms of light that wildlife and ecology evolved around.

So by introducing something as foreign as artificial light at night, we’re putting something into the environment that wasn’t naturally there, and certainly something we haven’t been able to adapt to very quickly. Almost everything researchers are looking at now is being shown to have an impact.

Take nocturnal species. Australia has the most nocturnal species in the world, probably because it’s a hot environment during the day. Their reproductive patterns rely on darkness. Birds have calls they make at night to look for their mates. But if it’s light, those natural processes don’t go on. They could be scared to go out. They might not think it’s actually dark. Maybe it’s still sunset. “Should I call for my friend or should I not call for my friend?”

Our pollinators, literally those moths to a flame, are actually being drawn to streetlights. Rather than getting to our crops and the yields we need pollinated, we’re distracting those pollinators to streetlights.

That’s our wildlife. But from a human health perspective, something we talk about fairly commonly now is our circadian pattern. Our circadian rhythms are dictated by light, by sunlight. Everything from the twilight morning light to the twilight evening light is giving us triggers and cues to do certain things in the daytime, with that bright blue light in the middle of the day being the trigger to be at our best and most active.

If we’re putting artificial light, sometimes at the same colour temperature as that daytime light, into our bedrooms and our houses, we’re pretty likely triggering those same responses that should be happening in the daytime during the night instead.

Scientists are seeing correlations with diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, all sorts of things. It seems to be because of that cellular response. Instead of getting darkness, when we can repose and relax and settle into the night and rejuvenate, our bodies are being triggered by impulses far beyond our awareness to be active.

So that’s a consequence we can all think about. But I’ll go back to the beginning of your question and say that it’s something we can all do something about. The minute you turn off a light is the time you actually remove that impact. Unlike plastics, which might take 450 years to break down in the environment, literally you remove that light, you’ve removed the impact. And not only that, you’re saving money and making it a better environment for all our natural wildlife. And for yourself, when you turn your mobile phone off.

Brendan: Thank you, Marnie. That’s true, yes.

The Virtual Solar System Drive Audio Tour at Siding Spring and Coonabarabran

Brendan: You and Fred have also created the audio tour for the Virtual Solar System Drive out near Siding Spring Observatory around Coonabarabran, a beautiful place, with the Anglo-Australian Telescope dome standing in for the Sun.

I’ve done that drive with my family, and it is brilliant. I can highly recommend it as a way of understanding the absolute vastness of our humble little solar system. For our listeners, I’ll put a link to the virtual drive in the show notes.

Now, how did that audio collaboration come about with you and Fred, and how have visitors responded to driving between the planets?

Marnie: Well, as you mentioned in the introduction, Fred was one of the great minds behind the Solar System Drive itself, and maybe he can explain how that came together.

I was doing some work with Siding Spring Observatory, coordinating some new tourism products out there as a pilot program to see if we could get travellers through that beautiful big telescope out in the Warrumbungle National Park, on a weekend basis, showing people around.

People would often get to the observatory and say, “Oh, I didn’t realise that there were planets along the way. We drove past and we didn’t know when they were coming up.” I think that was one of the difficulties with the Solar System Drive itself: unfortunately, they were unable to get brown signs for the planets. So as you approach a planet, you don’t have any warning.

It came to me that I was hearing this feedback, and I knew about these geopositioning apps that you could get. So Fred and I pulled the content together about what the planets are known for, and also some of the little bits and pieces of the area as you drive past them.

Literally, as you drive past, it triggers and comes up with Fred’s or my voice telling you what you’re about to come up to and also what you’ve probably just driven past.

So it’s been fun. People have given us great feedback about it. More than anything else, it’s just nice to see the experience enhanced, because it was a big undertaking for Coonabarabran and the surrounding councils to put that together and really make it something unique to Australia.

Brendan: Yeah, it’s beautiful.

Marnie’s Advice for a First Astrotourism Trip

Brendan: Okay, now look, I’ve got one last question for you, Marnie. You’ve hosted solar eclipse and aurora expeditions and astronomy tours all over the world. For any listeners who’ve never travelled for the sky, what would you suggest as a first astrotourism trip?

Marnie: I think to answer that question, it would be very hard to go past Australia as a dark sky destination.

One of the things I say to everybody, when we’re pitching to councils to value what we’ve got, is that we do have the darkest, clearest, most accessible dark skies in the world. We really don’t have to go very far out of our cities to see a dark sky, to see more than perhaps the 27 stars that some Northern Hemisphere cities only ever get to see.

Almost everybody I’ve ever spoken to will say that moment where you get out to the desert and look up and see so many stars just takes your breath away. People from Asia, North America, India, Europe and the UK are all paying big money to come out here to see it, because it’s something they’ll never get in their own country.

If you’ve ever experienced places literally west of the Great Dividing Range, you’ve probably seen some of the best skies in the world. I won’t handpick any, because there are so many beautiful places in Australia.

If you do want something international, Chile is pretty spectacular. Peru is spectacular. Some of the big telescopes in North America are worth seeing just because of the history with them, with Hubble and scientists like that.

But I really can’t go past Australia. I’m very, very enamoured with our beautiful dark skies here. I just encourage everybody to go out and experience them, value them, and then feed back to those councils and the areas you go to how much beauty they inspire in you, so that they start to value them too.

Brendan: Excellent. Thank you, Marnie.

Over to Fred Watson: A Career from Sputnik to the Anglo-Australian Telescope

Brendan: Okay, now over to you, Fred. Marnie has had her turn and now it’s yours. Please make yourself comfortable in the hot seat.

Fred: It is hot.

Brendan: Thank you. Okay, listeners, I’ll begin with a very brief synopsis of Fred’s career.

On very rare occasions, a career begins with a three-year posting and ends up lasting 50 years. Fred Watson’s is one of those.

He was born in Bradford, UK, in 1944, studied at St Andrews, and worked at both of Britain’s Royal Observatories. In 1982, he came to Australia on a three-year deployment to the UK Schmidt Telescope at Siding Spring. That was over four decades ago, and he is still here, doing amazing science at Siding Spring.

Fred helped pioneer the use of optical fibres in astronomy, a technique that lets a telescope gather light from many objects at once. I think they’re called Starbugs. This innovation became the subject of his PhD and it changed the way astronomers survey the sky.

In 1995, he became astronomer in charge of the Anglo-Australian Observatory, looking after the 3.9-metre Anglo-Australian Telescope, the largest optical telescope in the country. It’s yellow and it’s beautiful.

Then there’s the Fred most Australians know: the voice on ABC Radio, the guest on The Project, and the author of books including Stargazer, [Elwires – title unclear, please check], Uranus Upside Down, Star-Craving Mad, Exploding Stars and Space War.

That work brought him the David Allen Prize in 2003, the Eureka Prize for Promoting Understanding of Science in 2006, and in 2010 membership of the Order of Australia. In 2018, he became Australia’s first Astronomer at Large, advising government and speaking for Australian astronomy, including at the United Nations. He stepped down from that role in 2024.

He’s also a musician, a dark sky advocate, and co-host of the Space Nuts podcast, which makes him something of a fellow traveller.

Today we’ll talk with him about the telescopes, the sky, and what 50 years of looking up has taught him.

So, Fred, you’re famous as Australia’s astronomer at large. You didn’t start out in Australia; you grew up in the UK. When did the sky first grab you, and what made you decide that a life in astronomy was the best fit for you?

Fred: Yeah, it’s a good question. The short answer is that I’m a product of my time. When I was at school, it was effectively the beginning of the space age: 1957, the first artificial satellite launched by the Soviet Union, Sputnik 1.

My colleagues at school were all mad keen on space and astronomy and the exploration of the universe. That was encouraged, because there was a very strong push in UK education at the time towards science. The reason was that there’d recently been a world war fought very much on a technological basis, and the UK government and many other governments thought there might be another one and they were going to need scientists. So science was very much in the ascendancy then, in a way that probably it hasn’t been since. It’s gone through better phases at some times than others.

We were all enamoured with the idea of exploring the universe, whether we were going to ride in spaceships like Dan Dare, the Pilot of the Future, on the front page of the Eagle comic every week, or whether we were going to be looking through telescopes at the universe. It basically inspired us all.

As time went on, throughout my school career and subsequently, my fellow space nuts, I guess they were then, gradually turned their attention to more sensible careers like medicine and engineering and local government. But I’m afraid I had stars in my eyes from the word go and they never really left me. That’s what set me off on a career in astronomy.

I might just add one little component. You’ve done an extraordinarily accurate synopsis of my life, Brendan, which is kind of nice to hear. My first job in astronomy, after my degree at the University of St Andrews, was working for two years at the company that 100 years before had built the biggest steerable telescope in the world, the Great Melbourne Telescope. It was then called Sir Howard Grubb Parsons and Company Limited, and I worked for it in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England in 1967.

Not only did they make what was the biggest telescope in the world and send it to Australia in the 1860s, they had a career of manufacturing big telescopes throughout the world. Subsequently, after I left the company, they built several more. The thread that runs through my entire career is that I’ve used all of their big telescopes, and I was astronomer in charge of two of them, the Anglo-Australian Telescope and the UK Schmidt Telescope.

So the two years I spent in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, immersed in a heritage that went back 100 years but looking forward to a world of new big telescopes, I think was quite pivotal in my career. It’s something that, in many ways, I’ve only really recently recognised.

Brendan: Beautiful. Thank you, Fred. That sounds awesome. You haven’t got that many years on me, Fred. My first memory is standing out in the backyard with my family as a four-year-old, looking up and seeing Sputnik 1 pass directly overhead our house in Mansfield. The headlines in the Sun newspaper at the time spoke about a “Russian red moon”, so we were out in the backyard looking for this red object in the sky. Finally, all we saw was this tiny little white speck moving across the sky. And it was just so awesome. This four-year-old loved it.

Life on a Mountain: Working at the Anglo-Australian Telescope and the Problem of Atmospheric Turbulence

Brendan: Now, your career has been closely tied to Siding Spring and the Anglo-Australian Telescope. For listeners who’ve never been there, I’m proud to say I have been in the control room with Chris Lidman. It’s awesome, of course. But what is it actually like working on top of a mountain with a big telescope at night? And what was, or what is still, the most memorable moment you’ve had up there at Siding Spring?

Fred: Yes, it’s quite an experience. The interesting thing, Brendan, is that when you’re a working astronomer, hanging around the dome and building of the biggest telescope in the country is your stock in trade. It’s what you do. It’s your everyday experience. You have to pause every now and again and think, “Well, actually, this is something quite extraordinary. There are probably not all that many people in the world doing this same thing.”

The telescope itself has a 3.9-metre diameter mirror. My association with it goes back to before the mirror was delivered to the company that manufactured the telescope, because I looked after the supporting material that the mirror was going to sit on when it was being optically polished in 1969, believe it or not. So my association with the telescope goes back further, I think, than anybody else in Australia.

In 1995, as you mentioned earlier, I became its astronomer in charge. I’d been a user of the telescope many times before that. But when you’re astronomer in charge, you’re kind of the shopkeeper. My office was in the dome of the Anglo-Australian Telescope, a building 50 metres high, essentially a white cylinder with a slightly more than hemispherical dome sitting on top of it. I always tell people I spent so many years working in that dome that I actually started to look like it. And that’s the hairstyle that I have.

What you’re doing as astronomer in charge is, first of all, liaising with the operations manager, who is responsible for keeping all the engineering work going. But the astronomer in charge’s role was very much about getting the very best data from the telescope for our users. A telescope like that is not just used by the staff. It’s used by the community that it serves, principally the university communities and some of the other institutional communities such as CSIRO throughout the country. In the early days, when it was jointly operated by the British and Australian governments, it was the British astronomical community as well that we were serving.

So we were aiming to please. We were aiming for excellence every day, so that our researchers, when they came, sometimes from halfway across the world, to use the telescope for a few nights, as indeed I did back in the 70s, got the very best results from their experience. In that regard, it was quite challenging.

You asked me about the best moments, and it might sound a little bit humdrum, but one of the best moments on a telescope like that is to get to the end of a night when everything has worked. The telescope has performed admirably. The instruments, which are always at the cutting edge of instrumental science, have performed flawlessly, and the weather has not let you down.

And of course, the weather coefficient we use to measure the performance of a telescope is not necessarily the cloud cover, although that’s fundamental. You need clear skies for an optical telescope to work. But the other thing you need is as little turbulence in the atmosphere as possible.

We in Australia have turbulence conditions which, certainly at Siding Spring Observatory, are very good. They’re not, however, the best in the world. So we’ve used the telescope in such a way that the amount of turbulence is less of an issue. That’s why we concentrated on this technique of using fibre optics to gather the light from stars and galaxies and reformat it, so that you can look at many of these objects at once.

Just to close the loop on that conversation: the sites in the world where atmospheric turbulence is minimal are very limited. In the Southern Hemisphere, they are essentially the high peaks of northern Chile, which is where the telescopes Marnie mentioned earlier are situated. For example, the European Southern Observatory operates four 8-metre-class telescopes, which collectively are known as the VLT, the Very Large Telescope. In 2028, their new telescope, the ELT, the Extremely Large Telescope, will start operations. It has a mirror 39 metres in diameter, exactly 10 times the diameter of the Anglo-Australian Telescope mirror. The reason for those developments is that they have the very best atmospheric conditions in the Southern Hemisphere.

I might add that we in Australia at the moment have a strategic partnership with the European Southern Observatory that allows Australian astronomers to use those telescopes at Cerro Paranal in northern Chile. That sadly comes to an end in 2027, so we will no longer be affiliated with the European Southern Observatory.

Fibre Optics and Multi-Object Spectrographs: From FLAIR and Panache to Starbugs

Brendan: You mentioned fibre optics. You’ve worked on instruments as well as looking through them. Could you give us a 90-second version of how the fibre optic system you developed allows astronomers to collect light from many galaxies and many stars at once? How do spectrographs work with the fibre optics, and why was it such a leap forward for science?

Fred: Yes, indeed. I was very, very lucky to be in the right place at the right time. I was working on the United Kingdom Schmidt Telescope, a very wide-angle telescope, and at that time, in the early 1980s, its stock in trade was photography. We were using photographic plates, 14 inches on a side, 360 millimetres or thereabouts, and a millimetre thick, because they had to bend in the focus of the telescope, these glass plates.

But a technology was just being talked about and developed at the University of Arizona by a very accomplished scientist by the name of Roger Angel. He recognised that the advent of low-loss optical fibres, which are almost like guitar strings, strands of material, offered opportunities for astronomers. You put light in at one end and it comes out almost unabated at the other end, and they’re completely flexible.

He had a number of ideas, but one turned out to be the big breakthrough: using optical fibres to collect the light from stars or galaxies in the field of view of a telescope. Instead of letting that light fall on a photographic plate to record the images, you could position optical fibres in alignment with the target objects you want to analyse, take the light from those objects, and bring it to a very convenient place where there is an instrument called a spectrograph.

A spectrograph splits the light from the end of each fibre, in other words star and galaxy light, into a spectrum, a rainbow spectrum. There you have access to that barcode of information present in the spectrum of all celestial objects, which gives us all their intimate details about the conditions under which the light was emitted and the conditions through which that light has passed.

The trick, though, is that your fibre needs to be positioned with an accuracy of one hundredth of a millimetre. You’re not just plonking it down any old random place in the field of view of the telescope. It’s got to be very precise. There were literally no more than a dozen of us worldwide working on this technology in the early 1980s. A lot of our colleagues thought we were bonkers, because they thought this would never catch on.

I had quite a small budget on the UK Schmidt Telescope to develop a series of these multi-object spectrographs, as we call them, because you’re looking at many objects at a time. And I haven’t mentioned the big breakthrough. Until then, if you wanted the detailed spectrum of a celestial object, you did them one at a time. Suddenly here was a way of doing them dozens at a time initially. Soon it was going to be hundreds at a time, and today it is thousands at a time. You can use this fibre optic technology to bring in huge quantities of data on celestial objects, whether they’re stars or galaxies.

My PhD was based on work I did partly on the Anglo-Australian Telescope, but also on the UK Schmidt Telescope. I developed a series of instruments, the first of which was called FLAIR, an acronym for Fibre-Linked Array Image Reformatter. We improved that in the late 1980s to make it Panache, which stood for Panoramic Area Coverage with Higher Efficiency.

Towards the end of the 1980s, I was looking to build a third version, which we wanted to call Finesse. Flair, Panache, Finesse: it’s a good series. Until one of my colleagues said that Finesse would stand for “Fails to Interest Nearly Everyone Save Electrical Engineers.” So it actually ended up being called FLAIR 2.

FLAIR 2 was the predecessor of an instrument built with robotic fibre positioning, something that would use a robot to move these fibres around with that precision I mentioned. That was called 6dF. The 6dF successor was the instrument you’ve mentioned already, Brendan, the Starbugs instrument, in which each fibre had its own built-in individual robot.

I can’t claim any responsibility for that at all, because by then I was in a different regime. I wasn’t building instruments anymore. But my colleagues at the AAO, which now stands for Australian Astronomical Optics, did a marvellous job building this and demonstrated that it would function properly on the UK Schmidt Telescope.

Brendan: Beautiful. Fantastic. Thank you, Fred.

Stargazer: Hans Lipperhey, the Birth of the Telescope and the Unsung Leonard Digges

Brendan: You’re also an author and a broadcaster. You’ve got scores of publications and hundreds of media appearances under your belt, and your book Stargazer tells the story of telescopes, their origins and development. If you had to pick one moment in that history when everything changed, what would it be? And who is this unsung hero, Leonard Digges, that every sky watcher should know about?

Fred: His was not the moment you’re referring to. I’ll go back to Leonard Digges in a minute.

In 1608, a German-born Dutchman by the name of Hans Lipperhey turned up at the government of the northern provinces of the Netherlands, which were at that time at war with the southern provinces and the government of Spain. So there’s a war going on, and this dude turned up. He was a spectacle maker. He had a tube with a lens at either end and said, “Look what I’ve got. This is a strategic weapon that you can use. Can I have a patent for it, please, for 30 years?”

The answer he got was no, but that was the first appearance of the telescope in the historical record. It did work. It was what we now call a Galilean telescope, because it was perfected by Galileo. That was in September 1608.

I might add, as an aside, that one of Marnie’s and my most memorable tours, taking tour groups to Europe, was to celebrate the 400th birthday of that, on the day, in the place where it happened, at the Binnenhof in The Hague in the Netherlands. It nearly didn’t happen. There’s an epic story about that, which I think I recounted in Star-Craving Mad. But Marnie basically had to sprint to collect the birthday cake. It’s a long story.

Anyway, going back to Leonard Digges. He was a gentleman in essentially Tudor England, 39 years old when he died in 1559. He wrote a book which was quite a bestseller, called A Prognostication Everlasting of Right Good Effect. It was upgraded by his son, Thomas. In fact, 13 years after Leonard’s death, a new edition was published in which Thomas Digges essentially set out our modern view of the solar system. Copernicus had published that in 1543, but it took a long time for the idea that the Sun was at the centre of everything to catch on. In some places it was still not believed even in the 18th century.

Leonard Digges not only wrote about the solar system going around the Sun rather than the Earth, he also talked about experiments that his father had done with lenses and mirrors. He essentially suggested the idea of a telescope bringing an enlarged view of a distant scene to the eye. He said these were not just thought experiments, but the results of his father’s “continual painful practices”. He made some claims about being able to see what was going on at a distance of seven miles, being able to see the denomination of coins scattered around a field. Those claims are absurd. The technology that would be needed to do that was still 200 years in the future.

So this was not something that Leonard Digges had really achieved, but he had obviously laid the groundwork for some of these ideas, the thinking that you could perhaps use lenses to make something that would magnify distant scenes. So yes, he does have a place in history. I think he was one of the “nearly made it” category of scientists of that era, very much tuned into the idea of developing a telescope. But we didn’t really see it in the historical record for another 30 years.

Brendan: Fantastic. Thank you, Fred.

Building the Virtual Solar System Drive and Pluto’s Demotion

Brendan: Well, let’s talk about a development that did actually happen: back to the Virtual Solar System Drive. I understand you were on the original committee that developed that concept. What was the original version? I understand the journey to build it was long and expensive. Did it turn out the way you imagined? Or perhaps Marnie came along and rescued it with the audio tour?

Fred: That’s certainly true. The audio tour put it on the map in a way in which we were unable to at the time.

It’s the world’s largest virtual solar system tour. It takes the Anglo-Australian Telescope dome as representing the Sun at a scale of 1 to 38 million, and the distances to the planets are strung out along five major highways in north-western New South Wales. That’s the principle of the virtual solar system tour. It is not the world’s largest model of the solar system. That is in Sweden, and we’ve visited it many times on our tours to see the aurora borealis, the northern lights, in the Arctic.

Going back to Australia, the problem was that we used all our resources. It was funded partly by the Department of Industry, partly by local government. We used all our resources to build these four-metre-square panels with depictions of the individual planets, spread out along the roads at the right distances. As Marnie said, we ran out of money to put in the brown signs you needed to say, “One kilometre ahead, planet Jupiter.” People whizzed past these things without knowing what they were. It was Marnie’s audio tour that gave us the opportunity to essentially rescue that problem. And I think it has been, as you mentioned, quite successful.

The origins of the virtual solar system tour itself were slightly interfered with, in a way, because we were putting the finishing touches to this in August 2006. I don’t know whether that rings any bells with you, Brendan, but August 2006 is when Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet by the “ubernerds of Prague”, as one headline put it, because it was the International Astronomical Union meeting in Prague that defined what a dwarf planet is.

We were putting the final touches on the Solar System Drive at that point. So we had to change the wording describing Pluto from Pluto being the ninth planet to Pluto being a dwarf planet. We had to change the already finished wording, letter by letter, on these four-metre-square boards with little representations of Pluto on them. And the problem was we were being charged by the letter. So you had to work out how to tell the new story in as few letters as possible without disturbing what was already there about Pluto being a planet. That’s why the wording is slightly awkward in places. I’m not really proud of Pluto in the world’s largest virtual solar system tour.

Brendan: I’ll have to make sure I go and check it out next time I’m on the Newell Highway.

The Question Fred Gets Asked Most: What Was Before the Big Bang?

Brendan: Okay, Fred. You’re a media astro star. You spend a lot of time answering questions from the public through radio, podcasts, talks and colloquia. What’s the question you get asked most often? And is there one that has genuinely stumped you or made you rethink the way you explain our beautiful cosmos?

Fred: I think it’s the same question, actually, Brendan. It’s both often asked and, in a way, one that stumps us. We do have an answer for it, but not necessarily the right one. Our answer is based on the best understanding of the way the universe behaves that we have, which is Einstein’s general theory of relativity, dating from 1915.

So what’s the question? What was before the Big Bang?

You can answer that in a number of ways. If you want to be cynical, you can say that immediately before the Big Bang, somebody said, “Damn,” and then Big Bang. That may or may not be the case.

But relativity tells us that not only did space and the material content of the universe get created in the Big Bang, time also started. So essentially there wasn’t anything before the Big Bang, because “before” doesn’t mean anything: there was no time before the Big Bang. That gives rise to, I guess, the second glib description of the origin of the universe: “In the beginning there was nothing, and then it exploded.”

In a way, that’s us being stumped. Whilst we can look at the physics of the Big Bang process back to within a gazillionth of a second of the Big Bang itself, and understand the physical processes taking place, the actual instant of creation defies our knowledge. We simply don’t have the mathematical and physical tools to describe how a singularity, a point in space with no dimensions, became something that would explode and release all this energy that today has condensed into the universe we see around us.

It’s an extraordinary concept, but it’s one we believe is what actually happened, when you look back at all the evidence we have for the early universe and its origin.

Brendan: Beautiful. And that’s exactly what I love about science. The questions and the answers are equally important. The questions are what drives science, and the answers are what give us understanding. That’s fantastic, Fred.

Asteroid 5691 Fred Watson and Stargazing Live with Brian Cox

Brendan: Now, I’m also told there’s an asteroid with your name on it, Asteroid 5691 Fred Watson. I know these how-does-it-feel questions are terrible, but how does it feel to have a wandering piece of our solar system named after you?

Fred: Well, of course, it’s an honour. It’s got a bit of a story to it. When the International Astronomical Union, which is the only body in the world that can formally name astronomical objects, adopted the name Fred Watson for 5691, I went home and told my two young sons, James and Will. I told them, “I’ve now got an asteroid named after me.” They said, “Dad, that’s terrible. If it hits the Earth, it will be your fault.” They were making a good point.

But it turns out that Asteroid 5691 Fred Watson is probably the single most boring asteroid in the solar system. It’s a main-belt asteroid. It just wanders around the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, will never come anywhere near the Earth, and goes on its merry way. I think it’s fair to say, Brendan, it has absolutely nothing to distinguish it from the millions of other asteroids in there. It’s greeted with a yawn.

However, I do have a lovely photograph taken by an amateur astronomer in South Australia. I’ve had it framed, with the trail of an asteroid across the middle of the photograph, and that is Asteroid Fred Watson.

We also saw it live, nearly a decade ago now. We did two episodes of a programme called Stargazing Live, which was indeed live on both the BBC and the ABC simultaneously, broadcast from Siding Spring Observatory with a chap called Brian Cox, of whom you might have heard. Brian and I stood in front of a screen as somebody operating a large telescope brought up on that screen an image of Fred Watson, live, as we were watching. And yeah, that was quite a moving moment, I have to say.

Brendan: Beautiful. Fantastic.

Fred’s Other Passion: Music, Ross Edwards and an APRA Award

Brendan: Now, Fred, before we go into closing mode, are there any other questions I’ve forgotten to ask you?

Fred: I had a feeling you might be wandering into music there for a minute, Brendan.

Brendan: Ah, right, yes. I love it.

Fred: Well, music has played a big part in my life, and Marnie’s too, of course. Marnie used to sing with James Morrison, a very well-known jazz trumpeter. Marnie was the voice that accompanied his band a long time ago.

My fascination with music goes back to my youth. I was captivated by classical music very early on. I went to my first symphony concert when I was 15 and never looked back. But that’s listening. It was only at university that somebody gave me a guitar and said, “Why don’t you learn to play that?” We were singing gospel songs at the time, actually, but that took me into the world of folk and blues, and I became quite good on the guitar. I’m not sure how good my voice was. But for a while in the late 60s and early 70s, I was regarding music almost as a possible profession.

In fact, it was my profession while I was doing my master’s degree, because I was teaching guitar and singing in folk clubs to try to earn a crumb while I was studying. That brought me into contact with some people who later became very well known, people like Gerry Rafferty, whose famous “Baker Street” track still echoes around our airwaves. And a fellow called Billy Connolly. These were people who were also trying to make a crumb in the folk clubs of Scotland at that time.

So these two strands of music, classical and that folky, bluesy stuff, I don’t do much of it these days. I’ve still got the guitar and still occasionally do things. Marnie and I actually did a set on Lord Howe Island together last year, a half-hour set with her singing and me playing.

But I’ve also made inroads into the more formal musical scene, or rather I’ve been very kindly invited by a very well-known Australian composer, Ross Edwards, one of Australia’s most prolific and respected classical composers. I have written words for his music on a number of occasions. Initially it was his Symphony No. 4, a choral symphony, for which I gave him a musical journey through the night sky with First Nations names for constellations and stars. It’s called Star Chant. It actually won an APRA award. I think I’m the only Australian astronomer with an APRA classical music award to my name. His most recent work is called Vespers for Mother Earth, and it has some words that I’ve written as well.

That’s something I’m very humbled to have been able to do. I never thought I would be writing words for somebody whose music is so accessible and enlightening. And I’m sure those words and that music will long outlast any scientific contribution I’ve made, Brendan. That might be a bit of a paradox, but I think it’s true.

Brendan: Beautiful. Thank you very much.

Fred’s Rant: Starlink, Satellite Constellations and the Threat to Ground-Based Astronomy

Brendan: And the microphone is all yours. Do you have a favourite rant or rave that you would like to leave with our listeners?

Fred: Yes. As you mentioned at the outset, I was involved with meetings at the UN, in Vienna. It was a UN committee called COPUOS, the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. What we were discussing was the issue of satellite constellations and their effect on astronomy.

Of course, we are in an era where we currently have about 12,000 active Starlink satellites. They’re being replenished, because about one a day de-orbits. SpaceX has plans for another 30,000 or so Starlink satellites, and beyond that, plans for a million satellites to form an orbital data centre. Meanwhile, other nations have similar aspirations. There are two Chinese internet constellations planned, both as large as Starlink.

All this is polluting our sky, in the sense that astronomers have to cope with satellites trailing across their images and indeed affecting their spectroscopy, the measurements they make on stars and galaxies, because we’re looking through this web of spacecraft. They’re not exactly blinding our telescopes, but they’re certainly mitigating or inhibiting what we can do with our ground-based telescopes.

That is still a growing problem. There are ways of addressing it, and the best way is to engage with the satellite operators themselves. This is all being done by an International Astronomical Union centre, the Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky from Satellite Constellation Interference, usually just known as the CPS. They’re doing a great job, but it’s an unfinished work. We have a lot of problems facing us with this interference from space. It may well mean that one day the only way we can observe the universe is actually from space itself, because our biggest telescopes will have problems with these Starlink and other constellation satellites.

That’s my rant. I’m optimistic about it. I think it will have a happy ending. Maybe we’ll learn new ways of avoiding contaminating space. But let’s hope that, in the meanwhile, it will not prevent our biggest and best telescopes from giving us more information about the universe, the astonishing things we’re discovering today, and what that might lead to in the future.

Brendan: It’s great to hear you’re optimistic about it. I’ve done a few episodes interviewing space lawyers, and finding out about how electromagnetic radiation is leaking from Starlink satellites and interfering with our radio telescopes. Look, thank you, Fred.

What to Watch: The Total Solar Eclipse of 22 July 2028

Brendan: Now, just before we sign off, is there anything else we should watch out for in the near future? What are you two keeping your eye on? Do you want to go first, Marnie?

Marnie: You go first.

Fred: Well, I think we both will have the same answer.

Marnie: Okay.

Fred: The 22nd of July, 2028: the total eclipse of the Sun. I co-chair an Astronomical Society of Australia working group that is trying to prepare the whole country for what we’re calling AWE, the Australia-Wide Eclipse.

The path of totality will cover about a quarter of the country’s population. The whole population will see a partial eclipse. 75% of the population of New South Wales will see a total eclipse. This is big news and it needs a lot of preparation. It’s occupying me and Marnie too in ways that we wish it wasn’t, because we’d like to be getting on with other things. Once the 22nd of July, 2028 is out of the way, we’ll be able to do that.

Brendan: Beautiful. We’ll put it in our calendars.

Farewell and Astrophiz Sign-Off

Brendan: Well, thank you so much, Marnie Ogg and Professor Fred Watson. On behalf of all of our listeners, and especially from me, it’s been really fantastic to be speaking with you both about your inspirational work, and thank you especially for your time. Good luck with all your next adventures and all those future travels.

I’ll put links to ADSA and the Space Nuts podcast in the show notes. It’s fantastic. I have listened to it. It’s awesome. Go and listen to Space Nuts.

Thank you so much, Fred and Marnie.

Marnie: Thanks very much, Brendan. It was really fun talking with you.

Fred: Hear, hear. Thank you very much, Brendan.

Brendan: And in two weeks’ time, Dr Ian Musgrave is back with your holiday sky guide, where he will once again give us a working guide of what, when and where to find your celestial sights over the festive season, before we take a well-earned holiday break and prepare for our return on the 1st of February, 2027.

And remember, Astrophiz is free, ad-free and unsponsored. Find us on astrophiz.com or your favourite social media platform.

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