TELEVISION astronomer Heather Couper told pupils how they could reach for the stars at a celebrity lecture in Blackburn.
Heather gave an enlightening "Garstang Lecture" at St Mary's College, and revealed how her original career plan was for shop management.
The TV favourite, who has appeared on shows like Blue Peter, Tomorrow's World and The Sky At Night, explained how she got into star-gazing by accident.
She started off working for Peter Robinson, now Top Shop, as a management trainee in 1967 but then quit her career to take up a lowly post as a research assistant at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge.
Not content with that, she decided to become a professional astronomer and got a degree in Astronomy and Physics from Leicester University, followed by a doctorate at Oxford.
Heather then embarked on a meteoric rise through the astronomical universe and after a stint as a lecturer at the Greenwich Planetarium, she made the natural progression into popularising the science of the stars on television.
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