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Just a little bit about me. I live in Daventry, a small town in Northamptonshire, England. I retired from teaching in 2005 and since then I have spent most of my leisure time on a wide range of astronomical projects. For a number of years most of my practical work was done using a 12" Meade LX200 that was situated in roll-off roof observatory in my garden. Sadly ever increasing light pollution has meant that for the last few years all of my work has been done over the internet using telescopes based in the USA and Australia.
In the days when the Meade was in use I concentrated on neglected double stars. As the Washington Double Star Catalogue web site explains - "A large number of systems in the WDS may be characterized as ``neglected.'' These include unconfirmed binaries as well as systems which have not been resolved for many years. The reasons for this neglect are varied: poor coordinates or large proper motion (so the systems are ``lost''), erroneous magnitude or delta-m estimates (so the systems are skipped over or misidentified), or true neglect (too many binaries and too few observers). While the veracity of some of these systems is certainly suspect, many (if not most) of these are bona fide double stars. In all I observed 2,249 of these systems which put me, at the time of writing, in 7th place in the all-time list.
Since 2005 I spent a fair bit of time studying variable stars and found that there are many possible options for the remote observer with an interest in this section of the amateur hobby. I had my share of success and failure - as is always the case with amateur science - but overall had a lot of fun. Newcomers to variable stars do need to be aware that both the on-line and society-based resources available for amateur use are heavily duplicated and highly fragmented and there are some seriously strange people involved in this branch of astronomy.
I also spent (too much) time doing astronomical imaging, particularly narrow-band images of emission nebulae but also of asteroids, comets and any galaxies exhibiting pronounced dust lanes.
Martin Nicholson - Daventry, United Kingdom.
This page was last updated on April 26th 2009.