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I'd like to touch on how I knew Les through his writing. Les and I both grew up in Sydney, yet because we were at other ends of the city, I didn't get to know him until the US magazine Sky & Telescope invited both of us in 2001 to write regular columns for their global magazine - he did a monthly Southern Hemisphere binocular column and I did the overall sky as seen from the Southern Hemisphere. Les would then do the occasional deep-sky feature while I took on comets etc.
Our first face-to-face meeting was in 2003 when the then-US Editor of Sky & Telescope Rick Fienberg came out to Sydney. He and I were covering the IAU General Assembly being held here. We had a dinner with Les, a wonderful evening!
An editorial re-design at S&T in the mid-2000s saw Les's binocular column dropped, but by then I was Editor of the Australian edition of S&T and Les was thrilled to be invited to write both the AS&T binocular column, a regular deep-sky column, and the occasional feature or test report.
Les stopped writing for AS&T and elsewhere a year or so ago before I left AS&T in 2014 - and I couldn't find a suitable replacement. He was the finest deep-sky writer I had known here in Australia.
By chance, I learned earlier this year that Les was recovering from cancer surgery, and got in touch with him. He was confident it was gone ...
Yes, he struggled with life sometimes. But where he shined, you didn't have to take all day to see the sunlight. Vale Les - gone far too early.
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