Barry GilesBarry Giles was born in 1951 at Barnet in north London, UK. He grew up in East Barnet attending Church Hill Primary School, which is still there, until passing the 11 plus and going to Hatfield School which no longer exists. The school buildings late became part of the adjacent Hatfield Polytechnic which eventually became Hertfordshire University. He became interested in Astronomy at the age of 10, owning and building a succession of telescopes, eventually a 11.75 inch Newtonian before going to university. His particular interest at that time was in astronomical photography, doing all the processing in his father's shed, converted to a darkroom with a home-made enlarger. He was in the 4th East Barnet Cub and Scout groups, and also built and flew homemade balsawood model planes, his father's boyhood hobby. For the four years before going to university, he had a Saturday job at J.H Tripp's, a local builder's merchant to pay for his various hobbies. Here he gained background knowledge that was to prove invaluable many years later in Tasmania while building a holiday home as an owner-builder. After studying A levels in Physics, Maths, Computer Science and Engineering Drawing he went to Leicester University in 1970, the first member of his family to attend a university. Although briefly toying with doing architecture or computer science, the astronomy and physics option at Leicester won out. He studied pure maths and electronics for part of his first degree, but also needed to do a lot of 'Mini-van' car maintenance during those three years. He graduated with a first-class honours degree in 1973 and commenced a PhD at Leicester in high energy astrophysics as part of the X-ray astronomy group within the Physics department. Here he worked on the two Skylark rocket flights in the first chapters of this book. After a grant extension, he moved to the Astronomy department in 1977, then quite separate to Physics, and commenced doing ground-based optical and near-infrared observations on many telescopes around the world. He was awarded his PhD in 1978. Thanks to the sudden decision by Mrs. Thatcher's Government to limit UK post-docs to a maximum of 3-years financial support, regardless of the circumstances of their case, he emigrated to Australia in early 1981. Here he joined the X-ray balloon group at the University of Tasmania, and finding Tasmania to be a wonderful place to live he has endeavoured to stay there. In Tasmania he took up sailing and SCUBA diving, both activities never having appealed back in the UK climate. Over the following years he has been fortunate to dive at many locations around the world. At the university, he was engaged in the balloon flights detailed in this book and also further ground-based telescope work within Australia. Being employed on a contract, funding issues then dictated a move into Oceanography in 1983 when the CSIRO was moving its Marine research from Sydney to new laboratories in Hobart which created fresh job opportunities. Throughout the early 1980's, he became increasingly concerned with environmental issues and, after marching through Hobart on protest campaigns to save the Franklin River in Tasmania from being dammed, he decided that he had better take a look at it and rafted the river at Easter in 1984. A diversion back to the university occurred through 1985-1986 for the Australian Mirrabooka satellite initiative and the 1986 balloon flight at Alice Springs. Throughout these years he continued occasional involvement in ground-based work using the university 1 m telescope. With the eventual collapse of the Mirrabooka concept after the Challenger Shuttle disaster, he spent three years working with friends at the start-up company Protel, working on software for electronic circuit board design. A further two years in Hobart were spent as a self-employed software contractor, but he was not entirely out of research over these five 'commercial' years carrying out occasional optical projects o... Read More Read Less