About DarkOutdoors

Our Vision

DarkOutdoors is more than just a website.  It’s a central place to get information about where to do astronomy, what to observe and who to do it with.  It’s a comprehensive and cutting-edge way to promote, organise and find UK astronomy events.  It’s a way to find fellow astronomers and groups, a channel for UK astronomy news and a national meeting place for a community of enthusiasts.

Our History

It’s hardly a history if we’re brand new, is it?  Well as it happens, DarkOutdoors does actually have some ‘roots’.  Its creator, Neil Phillipson, previously maintained Surrey Astro Events – an events website dedicated to Surrey-based astronomy events, most of which involved his store, Astronomia in some way.  However it rapidly became clear that UK astronomy organisations far beyond Surrey lacked an effective, single channel for publicising events to the public.  Alongside running Astronomia, Neil is a web database developer and he set to work in early 2012 to create DarkOutdoors (after some three years of muttering about how important it all was).  Before long, it became clear that any such website would need to allow users of all types to contribute, so DarkOutdoors ended up being a full-blown Geographical Information System (GIS), blog and social network!  It leverages some of the very latest web technologies (like HTML5, CSS3 and AJAX) to achieve this noble aim.

Just to be Clear

DarkOutdoors is intended as a facility – not a group, society or organisation.  Although we expect it to be used by all manner of astronomy organisations as well as individuals, it is not, in itself, a group – so whilst it is policed (a bit) there is no leadership as such.  It is governed only by our acceptable use policy.

About the Creator

Neil Phillipson and his business partner, Adele Horton, own and run Astronomia, the astronomy store in Dorking, Surrey.  Neil has a masters degree in Physics and is a keen astronomer as well as an optics specialist.  Prior to opening Astronomia he ran an IT business which specialised in web-based database systems for all manner of customers from exam boards to finance houses.  Nowadays he splits his time between high-end web and design projects and the day-to-day management of Astronomia and its sister company, Viewpoint Optics.

Have We Left Something Out?

We haven’t told you everything, but hopefully this helps explain what DarkOutdoors is all about.  If you’d like to know more, please leave a comment below.