The Royal Mail is to celebrate 50 years of TV’s The Sky At Night with a special set of stamps. Six stamps will be issued in February 2007 showing spectacular pictures from the Hubble space telescope overlain with constellation patterns.
When Patrick Moore presented the first Sky At Night in April 1957, the show was expected to last three months.
Sir Patrick, 84, told me yesterday: “I like the stamps and feel very honoured. The Sky At Night is the longest-running running TV programme in the world with the same presenter and I don’t think our record is ever likely to be beaten.”
The six stamps – two first class, two at 50p and two at 72p – were designed by Dick Davies. They show five colourful gas clouds, or nebulae, and one distant galaxy.”
In another tribute to Sir Patrick, they also refer to his own Caldwell Catalogue by including its numbers for those fuzzy objects in the sky that Charles Messier overlooked. In case you were wondering, the catalogue’s title comes from the a part of Patrick’s name which he dropped – he is in fact Sir Patrick Caldwell-Moore.