Duncan Alasdair Lunan, born October 1945, is a Scottish author with emphasis on astronomy, spaceflight and science fiction,[1][2] undertaking a wide range of writing and speaking on those and other topics as a researcher, tutor, critic, editor, lecturer and broadcaster.

[8] Lunan, who grew up in Troon,[1] claims descent from an illegitimate son of King Robert II of Scotland, Alexander Stuart, who owned the "Lands of Lunaine" near Aberdeen, and, more distantly, from the astronomers of ancient Chaldea "who invented the calendar, hence making agriculture and civilisation possible".

In June 1959 he traveled to South Uist in the Hebrides to witness the test launch of an American MGM-5 Corporal, which the British Army had purchased as the nation's first nuclear missile.

[1] He was the manager of the Glasgow Parks Department's Astronomy Project responsible for building the Sighthill stone circle, the first astronomically aligned megalith built in Britain in 3,000 years.

[1] In a 1973 article in Spaceflight, a magazine published by the British Interplanetary Society (BIS), he said he had identified and deciphered a hidden radio message sent by an alien space probe[17] that had been caught but overlooked in the late 1920s by a collaboration of Norwegian and Dutch researchers who were studying the long delayed echo effect.

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.

[42] 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,[43][44] for which he holds regular talks.

[45] Duncan and Linda Lunan are in discussions about the possibility of helping create a public observatory on the Falkland Islands, with support from the British Antarctic Survey.

[53] Lunan has written that "In later research, I found that summer solstice fairs had been held on the Summerhill, from which the midsummer Sun rises over the true Sighthill, until they were stopped by the church in the 17th century".

[51][55] The project was not completed due to criticism by the incoming Thatcher government in 1979,[11][54][56][57] 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.

[5][51][52][54][56][58][59] The first initiative undertaken to draw attention to the megalith was a summer solstice gathering organised at the site on the evening of 21 June 2010[6][60] preceded by a presentation on the circle given by Lunan.

[5][6] Lunan presented plans to make the stone circle a key feature of a citywide 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.

[76] He also contributed two stories, "'Tirra Lirra' by the River, Sang Sir Lancelot" and "Landscape Modification in the Vicinity of Highgate Cemetery", to the 1988 Drabble Project of the Science Fiction society of the University of Birmingham and published by Beccon.

[82] In a 1996 Analog Science Fiction and Fact article,[83] Lunan speculated that the Green children of Woolpit were mistakenly transported to Earth[16] due to malfunction in a matter transmitter.