On this day: The Sky at Night first airs in 1957

The BBC astronomy show The Sky at Night earned its host Sir Patrick Moore a Guinness World Record as “most durable TV presenter”.

From when it first aired on 26 April 1957 until January 2013, the week after his peaceful death, Moore only missed one episode, due to a bout of food poisoning.

Moore was a vivid, eccentric character, rarely to be seen without his monocle, and a keen xylophone player.

Moore turned down a chance to study at Cambridge under a government grant - but his self-taught expertise meant that he was the first Westerner to see the images from the Soviet Luna 3 probe.

Moore was born in Middlesex, England in 1923.

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Moore covered the Apollo missions, and interviewed pioneers such as Orville Wright and Werner von Braun, the German scientist whose work for the Nazis, and later in America, paved the way for the space age.

Moore also interviewed many iconic astronauts- including the famously camera-shy Neil Armstrong. He also travelled to Russia to interview Yuri Gagarin.

Moore’s interest in astronomy was lifelong. At age 11, he joined the British Astronomical Association. At 14, he took over a small observatory near his home.

A sometimes controversial figure, he openly voiced his dislike of Germans - his fiancee was killed by a German bomb during World War II - and held strongly anti-European views.

He claimed to have stopped watching Star Trek after a woman took over the Captain's chair.

"How many people bought their first telescope thanks to Patrick Moore?" Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Galactic space flight company, wrote on Twitter after this death.