Astro Dog's 1st Birthday!

We've been incredibly busy working on lots of exciting things over the Summer and into Autumn. So busy that we almost missed an important date. It was the month of September that we began our Astro Dog adventure. So... it's our birthday!!! One whole year of Astro Dog!!

THANK YOU!

We would like to say a huge heart felt thank you to each and every one of you for all of your ongoing support. For each like, each follow, each tag, each share, each review and for all of you who have helped out with and attended stargazing events, words cannot explain how much we appreciate your support! From the bottom of our hearts, thank you!

A special thank you to Hidden Horizons for giving us the opportunity and platform to share our love of astronomy and astrophotography, plus all of the amazing opportunities that have come along with it. Another special thank you also to Forestry England and North York Moors National Park for all of their help, support and for allowing us to run our stargazing events in such an idyllic stargazing location.

REFLECTING ON A YEAR OF ASTRO DOG

This one year milestone is a great time to pause and reflect on what we've experienced and accomplished so far. As well as the things that we feel thankful for…

• Even though we were incredibly apprehensive and daunted about running our first stargazing events, we feel we have coped, learned and adapted very well, and have developed as individuals. We never thought we'd be able to speak to the public, let alone to so many people and have grown a little in confidence which is something we have often struggled with.

• It’s been a pleasure to be able to share our love and passion for the night sky with so many people. We’ve met so many wonderful guests along our journey, of all ages, from all walks of life, from all over the country and loved hearing about your stargazing stories and experiences. We’ve even had guests that have visited all the way from the USA!

• We’ve helped to inspire people to get out under the night sky, to buy binoculars, buy telescopes and help them make their first steps on their own stargazing journeys.

• We’ve sold out so many events, even delivering sessions over our usual capacity on some nights. In fact, we even ran back to back events, night after night for two weeks straight to keep on top of the demand during peak times.

• Seeing our younger guests be amazed by the wonders of the universe is rewarding on so many levels. We’ve been involved in some incredible collaborative events for cubs, beavers, scouts, guides and explorers. It’s been an honour to teach, nurture and inspire the young minds of the next generation of budding astronomers, scientists and thinkers through our public events, and also through STEM and outreach sessions.

• We’ve shared many beautiful moments with our guest's, witnessing some of the best meteors we've ever seen, even bolide fireballs that have outshone the Moon! We’ve treated many of our guests to their first mind-blowing viewings of celestial objects, such as asterisms, constellations, double stars, star clusters, planets, nebulae and galaxies (including our home galaxy the Milky Way).

• We’ve had the pleasure of running our events under some of the darkest, most beautiful skies in the world. We are incredibly lucky and thankful to be working with Forestry England and the North York Moors National Park in such an idyllic stargazing location. To have the opportunity to work in a dark sky discovery site and an international dark sky reserve (1 of only 19 in the world) has been a dream come true.

• It’s been amazing sharing our adventures and photographs with so many of you, reaching tens of thousands of people at times. We are always gaining experience and learning more about night-time and astro-photography and we feel we’ve captured some of our best images in the past year. We’ve even had a few of our images shared on the news. We've also had the press attend our events and appeared in national newspaper articles.

• Due to exposure through our work with running stargazing events, astro-journalism and astro-photography, we’ve amassed quite a following! There are 1383 people following Astro Dog’s Facebook page at the time of writing this post and we would like to send a heart-felt thank you to every one of you.

• As well as teaching others about astronomy, we’ve learnt so much for ourselves over the last year too, through all of the research we do to run our events and provide you all with the information and posts that we share.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

We are proud of everything we have achieved in the last year, and look forward to seeing more of you at our stargazing events. Happy would be an understatement on how we feel about the overwhelming support we’ve had from guests and followers during our first year, and would like to extend our gratitude to you all.

There are exciting new plans for Astro Dog in the near future and we cant wait to show you what we’ve been working on behind the scenes. Please keep an eye on our posts over this coming week for these announcements. We’re excited to see what the future has in store for us and look forward to another amazing year.

BIRTHDAY COMPETITION! A CHANCE TO WIN AN ASTRO DOG GIFT CARD!

To celebrate our birthday, and to thank all of you for supporting us on our journey, we will be hosting a competition to let one lucky Astro Dog follower receive a gift card for one of our future stargazing events. Look out for this in the coming days!

FINAL WORD

One last time we would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who has supported Astro Dog in our first year, we couldn’t be where we are without you!

THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH, NOW ITS TIME TO EAT CAKE!

Clear skies

P.S. If any of you have attended any of our events or enjoy what we do on here with science communication, blogging and astrophotography, it would mean a great deal to us if you could spare a few moments to write a little review, either here on Facebook (click on review and then click recommend) or on our new trip advisor page which will be live tomorrow.