The writer, comedian, champion 2022, amateur astronomer and astrophotographer, 51, on why the space race isn’t a waste of money – and the joys of being a puppy parent.
When did you first become a lunar nerd? You’re too young to have watched the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon landing…
To be honest, I’ve always been more of a big space nerd: cosmology and black holes and all that stuff.
But the Moon is just there and if you get a telescope at all, it is the first thing that you look at. You suddenly see a richness of detail that you’ve never seen before.
My beginner’s tip to everyone whoever asks about a telescope is to buy a set of binoculars first. You’ll see stars in detail and it’s amazing.
What do your family make of the seven telescopes in the kitchen?
That feels too many, doesn’t it? But it’s not. It really isn’t!
The telescopes are fine – they are kind of cool-looking – but the mounts are just three-legged tripods that sit at the end of the dining table.
The tripods are kind of woven around each other. That’s me trying to make them look as small as possible.
Some would say that they are blocking the view from the kitchen but, look, we all have our passions. It’s not motorbike parts.
It’s not bicycle chains and all grease coming off it. It’s not bags of golf clubs with mud on them.
I think this is better.
Can you recommend a stargazing app?
Pocket Universe is one (£2.99), Star Walk: Night Sky Astronomy is another.
Any of these ones where there is a mode on it where you’ll see a compass symbol.
When you hold it up, it will say on the screen what you are pointing it at. They are genuinely astonishing.
You can go, ‘Hang on, what’s those four stars?’ and when you lift it up and look you’ll see that it’s Cassiopeia.
Or even better, it’ll go, ‘It’s Venus, you idiot’ because Venus is incredibly bright.
It is all public information.
Nobody owns the maps of the skies so there are loads of apps that do it really well.
Why is there a new space race to return to the Moon? Is it worth the billions that’ll be spent on it?
I think it will be worth it in terms of resources that we will find.
I think it will also be worth it in terms of the gift of imagination for kids dreaming of space.
I was born in 1972 so you could say I overlapped with the last one but I don’t remember it. I can’t imagine how mind-blowing it must have been in 1969.
The other thing is that people say about the billions like they had to take £1billion and burn it to set the engine alight. It’s not. You are paying scientists’ and engineers’ wages.
The money doesn’t go to the Moon. The money very much stays here and goes around and multiplies into the economy.
In your new series you make a surprising discovery about how precious Moon rocks are delivered to scientists after they have been brought back to Earth…
The machinery of how we do all this sometimes hits the ordinary in a way that is quite delightful.
I was loving the fact that you take the rock on a 250,000-mile journey from the Moon. It sits in nitrogen for 50 years. And then you give it to DPD to deliver it.
Somebody has to be in between 11am and 1pm to sign for it because it’s a guy in a van and he’s dropping off loads of other stuff like M&S socks and underpants.
Did he leave the Moon rock by the door and take a photograph of your feet?
In a similar kind of way, Buzz Aldrin [who in 1969 became the second person, after fellow US astronaut Neil Armstrong, to walk on the Moon] has an expenses slip for the trip to the Moon to get the petrol back on his drive from Houston to Orlando.
It’s just a really mundane form with the Moon in the middle of the itinerary.
How have you passed on your love of astronomy and astrophotography to your two sons and daughter [with wife Susan]?
I have a routine about that in my show, about the presumptions that parents had in lockdown with the whole home-schooling era. ‘Oh, Father, this is so wonderful! You teach us so much about this! Your enthusiasm is so infectious!’
That is absolutely not the way it works.
With the boys and their sense of wonder, one is nerdier than the other in that regard.
The girl, no. The joke I do is, that’s just not the way it works as parents.
I would imagine David Attenborough’s kids at some stage have gone, ‘Oh, can you shut up about polar bears?
‘If you say polar bears one more time, I’m going to go into the oil industry and finish them off myself!’
We hear the family’s got a new puppy…
She’s a golden retriever, very cute.
The cuteness is totally offset by the tendency to want to chew your arm repeatedly.
It’s mid-morning now and I will go out and she will lie on the ground and conk out for the day but at 8pm she will go absolutely bananas and gnaw anything she can get her hands on.
I admire the sheer gall of her looking me right in the eye as she poos on my kitchen floor.
I admire the chutzpah of that. ‘Who is the dominant animal now?’
Wonders Of The Moon With Dara Ó Briain is on Tuesday and Wednesday next week on Channel 5 at 9pm. Catch up on My5
