Duncan Alasdair Lunan, born on 24 October 1945 in Edinburgh but living in Glasgow, is a Scottish astronomer and science writer.
He is a founder and an active member of ASTRA and supervised the creation of the Sighthill stone circle, the first astronomically aligned stone circle in Britain built for 3,000 years.
He is a published science and science fiction writer and an active member of the Glasgow Science Fiction Writers Circle, which he contributed to found.
Duncan Lunan participated as a speaker to the Glasgow-based World Science Fiction Convention of 1995 and 2005.
He is an active folk singer and a founding member of the TMSA ( Traditional Music and Song Association of Scotland).
His 1970s theories about the presence of a space probe orbiting around the Moon sent there by the inhabitants of a planet orbiting around Epsilon Boötis have brought him to international notice.
He is a firm believer in the existence of life on other planets.
Lunan studied English, Philosophy, French, Physics and Astronomy at Glasgow University, graduating with Honours in 1968. He added a postgraduate Diploma in Education, with Merit and Exemption, in 1984. Having completed the first third of a postgraduate Diploma in Management in 1969-70, he converted it to a Scottish Vocational Qualification in Management in 2000.
He joined the Scottish branch of the BIS (British Interplanetary Society) in 1962. He was on the committee which drew up the Constitution of ASTRA (Association in Scotland to Research into Astronautics) as an independent society in 1963, and redrafted it as the "Memorandum and Articles of a Company Limited by Guarantee" in 1974. He has been a Council member since December 1963 with only two short breaks, and has been Treasurer, President, Vice-President, Treasurer, President, Secretary, President, Treasurer and Secretary again during that time. He was re-elected Vice President in May 2010. He has been exhibition organiser and on the publications committee since 1970, editing ASTRA's publications in 1982 and 1992-96; among many ASTRA conferences he organised one on archaeoastronomy at the Third Eye Centre in 1978, "Heresies in Archaeoastronomy" at the Edinburgh International Science Festival in 1996 and its follow-up events in Glasgow.
In 1978-79 he was Manager of the Glasgow Parks Department's Astronomy Project.
He was Acting Curator of Airdrie Public Observatory in 1979-80 and was Assistant Curator in 1987-97, becoming a curator again in 2002 and continuing to 2008. ASTRA ceased to run the Observatory for North Lanarkshire District Council in May 2009, ceding the running of the Observatory to the Airdrie Astronomical Association (A.A.A). In 2006 and 2007 Lunan ran astronomy education projects funded by the National Lottery's "Awards for All", with outreach to schools and community groups, followed by a larger project funded by Heritage Lottery for 2007-2008. His monthly astronomy column "The Sky above You" has appeared in various newspapers and magazines since 1973.
He is also a honorary member of the Clydesdale Astronomical Society.
Along with his wife Linda, Duncan Lunan is running the "Astronomers of the Future" club for beginners who are keen to find out more about astronomy and space.
Duncan and Linda Lunan are also in discussions about the possibility of helping create a public observatory on the Falkland Islands, with support from the British Antarctic Survey.
Folk music
Duncan Lunan is an unaccompanied traditional singer and in the 1966 he was a founding member of the TMSA ( Traditional Music and Song Association of Scotland). Between 1963 and 1981 he has been running folk song clubs in Prestwick, Irvine and Troon and helped to run others in Stevenston, West Kilbride, Coylton and Kilmarnock; in the early 1980s he arranged tours in central Scotland for Martyn Wyndham-Read and Vera Johnson. He organised, sometimes with Chris Boyce, evenings of readings and music commemorating the launch of Sputnik 1, Yuri Gagarin’s flight on the Vostok 1 and the Apollo 11 Moon landing for Cottier's Theatre and at the Satellite 1 science fiction convention in October 2007 as well as céilidhs for several Glasgow science fiction conventions including the World Science Fiction Conventions of 1995 and 2005.
He wrote folk music articles and reviews for the Glasgow University Magazine in the mid-1960s and for The Glasgow Herald until 1981. He wrote several folk music parodies on science fiction or fantasy themes and more serious songs, four of which ("Space and Scotland", "The Falklands Arthur Macbride" co-written with John Braithwaite, "Hercules" co-written with his wife Linda Lunan and "Mythcon XV" co-written with Leigh Ann Hussey) have been published in Scottish folk music anthologies.
He is also a much-requested Burns supper guest.
Teaching and tutoring
In 1986, he contributed to the launch of the Glasgow Science Fiction Writers Circle by agreeing to run the first of six science fiction and fantasy short story competitions for the Glasgow Herald and to teach the first of six science fiction writing classes at the Glasgow University's Extra-Mural Department, later the Department of Adult and Continuing Education. He is still an active member of the Circle.
Duncan Lunan was a tutor in Astronomy, English Literature and Language and Creative Writing at the International Correspondence Schools (ICS) until 2008.
As the Manager of the Glasgow Parks Department's Astronomy Project in 1978-79, Duncan Lunan supervised the building of the first astronomically aligned stone circle in Britain for 3,000 years in Sighthill Park.
The inspiration for the circle was given by Lunan's interest in the works of Professor Alexander Thom and his son Dr. Archie Thom and by the expansion of the same by Dr. Ewan McKie and Professor Archie Roy.
The location of the stone circle, on a low hilltop between tower blocks, the M8 motorway and an incinerator, at a first sight seems hardly ideal, but it has a virtually perfect natural horizon, with an all-round view of the including the line of midsummer sunset across the city. On this location midsummer bonfires were lit and solstice fairs were held until the 17th century, when the Church banned them.
Once he had identified the best location, Lunan organised the transportation of the stones by a RAF helicopter from HMS Gannet. The Moon Stones, being too heavy, had to be transported by specially adapted lorries.
The project was not completed due to criticism by the new Thatcher government, and four stones - two of which were intended to mark equinoctial sunrise and sunset, East and West - are still lying under a bush in Sighthill park; Lunan is presently campaigning to have the circle renovated and completed; the first initiative undertaken in order to draw attention to the stone circle was a summer solstice gathering organised there on the evening of the 21st of May 2010 preceded by a presentation on the circle itself held by Lunan. The Heritage Lottery Fund is rumored to have been contacted to obtain funding for the project, whose cost is estimated to be of around 30,000 GBP.
Lunan presented plans to make the stone circle a key feature of a city-wide astronomy map, including the entire Solar System represented on the correct scale within the city limits as first proposed by Gavin Roberts, who was the Arts and Photographic Supervisor on the original Project. If the stone circle represented the Sun, Lunan said, Saturn would be by the River Clyde near the Glasgow Science Centre, Jupiter in the campus of the University of Strathclyde, Uranus on Maryhill Road and Neptune and the dwarf planet Pluto at Cathkin Braes, south of Castlemilk.
Duncan Lunan is a full-time writer on astronomy, space flight and science fiction; his books include Man and the Stars(published in the USA with the titles Interstellar Contact and The Mysterious Signals from Outer Space and translated into French by Jean Sendy as À l'écoute des galaxies and into Spanish by David Molinet as A la escucha de las estrellas), New Worlds for Old and Man and the Planets, created as book projects within ASTRA, and authored guest chapters in the other two books published with ASTRA participation, Extraterrestrial Encounter by Chris Boyce and The High Frontier edited by Bob Low. His current book project, Children from the Sky, was an ASTRA discussion project in 1994-95; he is also writing the text for a current project, Incoming Asteroid!, editing a second, Man and the Earth: The Politics of Survival, and co-writing the text for Building the Martian Nation, a book project of the Scottish Branch of the Mars Society.
A short story by Duncan Lunan, "The Comet, the Cairn and the Capsule", was included in the 1979 short story collection The Science Fictional Solar System edited by Isaac Asimov, Charles G. Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg. The "Notes about the Authors" section of the same book admits that the (U.S.-based) editors "don't know much" about Duncan Lunan but admire his stories.
His published work comprises three non-fiction books to date, contributions to 19 other books and altogether 30 short stories and about 600 articles. He was a science fiction critic for the Glasgow Herald between 1971 and 1985, ran the paper's science fiction and fantasy short story competitions between 1986 and 2002, founded the Glasgow Science Fiction Writers Circle in 1986-87 by agreeing to teach a science fiction writing class (he is still a member of the Circle), edited Starfield, Science Fiction by Scottish Writers for Orkney Press in 1989, to which he also contributed with a short story, "The Square Fella". Currently he writes Hawke's Notes for Jeff Hawke's Cosmos, the books and magazines published by the Jeff Hawke Club, reprinting the classic Jeff Hawke comic strip from the Daily Express, 1954-1972, continued in syndication until 1988.
He currently reviews books for Interzone and Concatenation.
In 1973, while writing for Spaceflight - the in-house publication of the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) - Duncan Lunan rose to international fame for his claims of having intercepted and interpreted an undeciphered message caught in the late 1920s by two Norwegian geophysicists. This message, according to Lunan, came directly from a probe at the L5 point in the same orbit as the Moon sent there by the inhabitants of a planet orbiting around Epsilon Boötis. The story got wide publicity and reached such publications as Time Magazine and the CBS Evening News. It was also presented in Rod Serling's 1975 TV documentary In Search of Ancient Mysteries and, many years later, in George Noory's Coast to Coast AM radio show. Lunan's theory has been variously refuted and found inspirational.
The message, as interpreted by Lunan, says so: "Start here. Our home is Upsilon Bootes, which is a double star. We live on the sixth planet of seven, coming from the sun, which is the larger of the two. Our sixth planet has one moon. Our fourth planet has three. Our first and third planets each have one. Our probe is in the position of Arcturus, known in our maps".
The 1974 Mark Brandis novel Raumsonde Epsilon (in English Spaceprobe Epsilon) is explicitly inspired to this theory.
In 1976 Lunan withdrew his Epsilon Boötis theory, presenting proofs against it and clarifying why he was brought to formulate it in the first place, but in 1998 he re-interpreted part of it, supported by other evidence from positional astronomy.
Lunan expressed a theory about the Green children of Woolpit according to which the two would be aliens erroneously transported to Earth.
His research has led him to identify the Green Girl and trace her descendants to the present; taking a lead from Robert Burton in the Astronomy section of The Anatomy of Melancholy, he suggests that the children were accidentally returned from a settlement of humans, established by extraterrestrials on an earthlike world with a trapped rotation.
Duncan Lunan is often quoted as one of the first to theorise the possibility of the presence of an ocean of some kind on Jupiter's moon Europa, his theories being considered plausible as opposed to Richard C. Hoagland's.
