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Speaker - Dr Paul Daniels (GAS member)

Sent in by Paul Daniels.

Paul has been interested in Astronomy since the age of 13 (in the days of the Apollo missions and the first Moon landing) when a school-friend let him look through his 4" Newtonian reflector and many happy nights were spent on sun-loungers in the garden watching for meteors. The ephemerides in the 1969 BAA Handbook particularly intrigued him and that was the start of a passionate interest in how such things were calculated and a desire to know more about the solar system.

Paul went on to get a degree in Astrophysics from QMC, London University, where he served as the QMC Astrophysical Society's Secretary and Chairman in his 2nd and 3rd years and introduced luminaries such as Dr Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, Prof Ken Pounds, Dr Patrick Moore and Prof Sir Hermann Bondi.

In 1981 he earned a PhD from Sheffield University studying aspects of dust particle accretion and the structure and evolution of comets and, during that time, gave adult evening class lecture courses about the solar system and was the first Physics postgraduate student at Sheffield to give an undergraduate lecture course (Minor Bodies of the Solar System).

Another year was spent at the Max Planck research institute in Garching (near Munich, Germany) developing some prototype software for ROSAT before, in 1983, his career moved away from Astronomy and into computing.

Paul has been a freelance IT contractor since 1988 and joined GAS about 5 years ago to renew his interest in Astronomy.

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