Astronomer Author Presenter
Adrian West
I'm Adrian, an astronomer, author, presenter, and dad who's spent my entire life looking up at the night sky and beyond, with over 20 years of experience trying to get others to look up also.
What I really do is translate the complex into the understandable — taking the vast, sometimes intimidating business of space and making it feel close, and astonishing, again. I've been at it for years, in every form I can find: on the radio and the telly, online and across social media, in my book The Secret World of Stargazing, through Meteorwatch, and in person at all sorts of events, performing at numerous different theatres and venues the length of the country — never the same place twice. The Night Sky Show alone has played more than seventy dates to sell-out audiences around the UK, but whether I'm on air, on a hillside, or on a stage, it's the same idea. It's all the one thing.
Away from all of it, I'm fairly ordinary — a loving partner at my side, and a dad not just to my son and daughter but to three rescue cats too, just as taken with the wildlife in the garden as the stars above it. I still drag the family out into the cold when the space station sails over or the Perseids are falling, and get the same daft grin every single time. And when I'm not out under the sky, you'll usually find me at the computer well past bedtime — happily lost in science fiction, teaching myself visual effects, and building the worlds and animations that end up in my online and in-person presentations and shows. What I make always takes its lead from the people who came before me, and from the great adventure films I grew up on — Star Wars, Indiana Jones and the like — forever chasing that same sense of wonder. I've never grown out of any of it, and I hope I never do.
The thread through everything is simple: the sky above your head is astonishing, and noticing it is good for you. That's the whole of it, really — someone standing in the dark, pointing upward, saying look at that.
