The Isle of Man Photographic Society had the pleasure this week of having Howard Parkin as our guest speaker.

Howard is an excellent and very experienced speaker, having been a teacher and lecturer - and, as a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, has an exceptional knowledge of astronomy and space exploration.

This expertise has, in recent years, led him into the area of guest lecturing on board cruise liners - with the added bonus of travelling around the world at cruise companies’ expense.

As he freely admits, it’s a tough job but he’s lucky enough to have it!

The year 2019 is the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin with Apollo 11 in 1969 and this provided the material - a mixture of video and sound clips of the history of space flight - for the evening’s first half. Spurred on by the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957 as the first Earth orbital flight and the subsequent launches of a dog and then Yuri Gagarin, then US President John F Kennedy determined to recover the initiative with the USA to land a man on the moon no later than 1969.

This, ever afterwards known as the space race, was explored in considerable historical detail via the successive and ultimately successful developments of the various Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions.

Howard’s presentation of that epic 1969 event - ’one small step for man - one giant leap for mankind’ - included the numerous scientific discoveries (for example, teflon and memory foam) that have followed, and has today led to the possibility of commercial flights and space tourism, as well as a new US initiative to send Man to Mars.

The second half covered Howard’s experiences as a lecturer on astronomy on board ship, and the various cruises he has been fortunate enough to have enjoyed in recent years.

These have sometimes been linked to major astronomical events such as eclipses and aurora.

As cruise ships have become ever more sophisticated in terms of the experiences available to their customers, he has had an input to the design and inclusion in their facilities of planetaria.

Howard received an enthusiastic round of applause for a well-paced and authoritative delivery, the clips of the space race in particular reminding us all of the many historic moments we have seen on TV and in film.

The society meets at the Arts Society Building (Thie Ellyn) in Withington Road, Douglas, on Wednesday evenings, all meetings starting at 7.30pm and all open to the public (with a modest fee for non-members).

Our next meeting, on November 27 will include presentations from two society members, Richard Shafto and Kevan Osborne.

More details of the society and its programme can be found on our website at www.iomps.com.

Chris Blyth