BACK IN SEPTEMBER 1969 in a laboratory in north-eastern England, a young, newly minted physics graduate was engaged in a job that no more than a dozen people worldwide would be doing. It was a humble task – fabricating a circular polyethylene air-bag 3.9m in diameter and no more than a couple of centimetres thick. What made the job unique was the purpose of this unwieldy plastic pouch. Once pressurised, it would cushion a 16-tonne disc of an exotic glass-ceramic material known as Cer-Vit while it was ground and polished during many months to form the precisely dished mirror of a giant telescope.
That starstruck youngster was me and this was my first encounter with the Anglo-Australian Telescope – the AAT – on which construction was just beginning in the venerable telescope-building works of Sir Howard Grubb, Parsons & Company at Newcastle upon Tyne, England. I could hardly have guessed that by the 1990s I’d be managing the same telescope’s scientific output as its Astronomer-in-Charge, and that in far-distant 2024 I’d be helping celebrate half a century of
