Hi and welcome to the 7th episode of the Urban Astronomer Podcast! This episode was dropped in the middle of the Easter weekend, so in deference to the season we've got a brief segment based on one of Urban Astronomer's religiously themed articles: How is astronomy used to calculate the dates of religious festivals? And our feature item is another interview! This time around, I managed to get a hold of Neil Viljoen, who owns Telescope Shop, one of the few dedicated telescope and astronomy suppliers in Southern Africa. We met under the pretext of having him troubleshoot my primary telescope, and he very kindly agreed to let me record an interview with him in his workshop.

Neil is not only a telescope salesman, but also a dedicated and hard-working astrophotographer - The judges at ScopeX awarded him the first prize in the 2015 astrophotography contest for his image of the famous HorseHead Nebula in Orion.  I have linked to the image below

Links

* Telescope Shop

* Neil on Twitter

* Neil's winning astrophotography image

* Amateur Radio Astronomy project