AI-generated satirical newspaper
About The Astronomer's Almanac
Founded 1904. No it wasn't.
Mission
Aperture first, sky later. This is an in-world profile for an AI-generated satirical newspaper; the staff, founding history, and institutional gravitas are fictional.
Staff
Benny Delacroix
Founding Editor
Former late-night comedy writer who got into astrophotography during the pandemic and discovered that the hobby is structurally identical to a very expensive practical joke the universe plays on you. Benny covers star parties, online drama, gear acquisition syndrome, and the psychosocial experience of standing in a field at 3 a.m. questioning your life choices.
Carmen Reyes-Whitfield
Standards Correspondent
Urban planner and dark-sky policy advocate who wandered into astronomy journalism sideways through her professional work on municipal lighting ordinances. Carmen covers light pollution, dark-sky advocacy, zoning battles, and the surprisingly political infrastructure of seeing stars. She has attended more city council meetings about LED color temperature than any human should.
Clive Ashford-Mowbray
Civic Affairs Desk
Amateur historian and antique telescope collector who has written more words about the provenance of Victorian refractors than most people write in a lifetime. Clive covers the history of observatories, forgotten astronomers, and the surprisingly cutthroat world of vintage optics auctions. He once outbid a museum for a Cooke triplet and felt only mild guilt.
Desmond Liu-Okonkwo
Culture Columnist
Planetary scientist turned obsessive deep-sky imager who once spent eleven months acquiring data on a single emission nebula and wrote nine thousand words about what he found inside the hydrogen-alpha channel. Desmond covers narrowband imaging, obscure catalogues, and objects that most people scroll past, treating each one as if it contains a secret that only integration time can unlock.
Dr. Margit Lindqvist
Field Reporter
Retired atmospheric physicist who spent two decades measuring sky brightness for the European Southern Observatory. Margit covers equipment testing, optical performance, and the quantitative side of observing with a rigor that other columnists find both admirable and exhausting. She does not review a telescope; she characterizes it.
Harold Kettleworth
Letters Editor
Retired optician who hand-ground his first mirror in 1978 and has never let anyone forget it. Harold covers visual observing, Dobsonian culture, and the spiritual decline of astronomy since people started 'letting computers do the looking.' His columns read like a man shaking his fist at a GoTo mount.
Jordan Okafor-Mills
Institutional Memory Desk
A thirty-one-year-old graphic designer who bought a used 8-inch Dobsonian off Craigslist eighteen months ago and has since fallen into the hobby with the intensity of a convert. Jordan covers the beginner experience, first-light moments, and the baffling tribal knowledge that veterans treat as obvious. Their questions tend to expose things the community has never bothered to explain.
Priya Subramaniam
Weekend Editor
Former machine-learning engineer at a self-driving car startup who now evangelizes smart telescopes, electronic assisted astronomy, and the democratization of the night sky. Priya covers emerging tech, software pipelines, and the future of observing from Bortle 8 backyards. She has strong opinions about stacking algorithms and will share them unprompted.
Siobhán Gallagher
Public Records Fellow
Astrophotographer and former financial auditor who approaches every consensus in the hobby with the suspicion of someone trained to find where the numbers don't add up. Siobhán covers astrophotography technique, processing workflows, and equipment value propositions, consistently arriving at conclusions that annoy the largest possible number of people.
Toshiro Nakamura
Copy Chief
Semi-retired telescope technician who spent thirty-five years aligning optics for university observatories across three continents. Toshiro covers collimation, mount mechanics, observatory construction, and the slow art of making instruments behave. He has aligned more Cassegrains than he can count and can diagnose a misaligned secondary from the sound a focuser makes.