visit Northumberland each year are now aware of its Dark Sky status. “We get a lot of people coming here to see the sky now,” says the man at the car-hire firm in Newcastle. “They come in autumn and winter, when it’s darkest. Good for the B&Bs as they get business all year round now.” Local hoteliers now issue guests with night-vision torches and put out deckchairs at night. Those who have acquired some knowledge of astronomy can receive a badge confirming that their hotels are “Dark Sky Friendly”. Wise acknowledges that Northumberland needs to do more to capitalize on its scarce resource and believes the region needs a couple more observatories to ensure that visitors will see what they came for. A £14m national landscape discovery centre, which he describes as the north’s answer to the Eden Project, will have an observatory when it is completed in a couple of years. Fildes has grand designs. He is planning Britain’s first “astrovillage”, one that would house the largest public observatory in the world and boast a 100-seat auditorium, a 100-seat planetarium, a one-metre aperture telescope, and radiomagnetic and solar telescopes. The multimillion-pound project would feature a hotel and draw in 100,000 people a year, four times the number currently able to use the observatory. Fildes is cryptic about his backers but believes the astrovillage will be a