For more than 50 years, one Tekapo couple have been watching the night sky.

Astronomers Alan Gilmore and Pam Kilmartin, pictured at Mt John, in Tekapo. (Photo Supplied).

In a tiny office next to a UC telescope dome, a kettle boils quietly. A heater hums; the temperature outside has already plunged to -4 degrees. A CO2 monitor on the desk beeps quietly, and Pam Kilmartin and Alan Gilmore sit together in silence.

Then, Gilmore’s screen lights up. A near-Earth asteroid is due to cross our sky. With practiced strokes, Gilmore adjusts the angle of the telescope. The camera at its base takes a series of photographs of the night sky, and Kilmartin springs into action.

With a notebook in hand, Kilmartin uses the University computers to compare the telescopic photographs; recording all the data in neat ballpoint handwriting, “just in case!”

The Tekapo couple have spent many decades tracking asteroids from the top of Mt John, and many more years in love.

Now both in their 70s, they have contributed years of detailed observations to international planetary defence programmes, using their easternmost vantage point in Tekapo to identify NEO’s and predict their ongoing orbits.

In June 2025, they were jointly awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit for their efforts, an honour Professor Roger Reeves, head of Physical and Chemical Sciences at the University of Canterbury, said was “marvellous recognition of a lifetime of work”.

According to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Order is awarded to those “who in any field of endeavour, have rendered meritorious service to the Crown and the nation…distinguished by their eminence, talents, contributions, or other merits.”

However, Kilmartin said she was "terrified" at the thought of receiving the award.

“We’ve just been doing what we both love for the last 50 years,” she said.

The couple first met at Wellington's Carter Observatory, where they established a programme tracking near-Earth asteroids. In 1974 they married, and in 1980, they moved to Tekapo to operate the planetary defence program from the University of Canterbury's Mt John Observatory.

Gilmore operates the telescope; opening the dome under infrared lights, in sub-zero temperatures, and then using the powerful telescope cameras to take “many, many, many pictures”.

Kilmartin measures the positions of the asteroids, logging the data and comparing orbits. The two sit and work in quiet tandem, their teamwork a “secret weapon”, Gilmore said.

The couple remain “honorary research associates”, of the University of Canterbury, said Gilmore, allowing them access to telescope time at Mt John.

According to Professor Roger Reeves, “Mt John is used as a major base for our scientific field research, and they are both very welcome there.”

“Alan and Pam still work on their own research, but they also provide measurements for many of our students at Canterbury”.

The couple have remained “a significant part of the university for decades”, Reeves said.

“The recognition of Alan and Pam is very well deserved, for a whole career of contribution to astronomy.”

A lifetime of global contribution was kindled decades ago, when a young boy in rural Wellington “watched a star fall”. That star was a falling asteroid, and the boy was a young Alan Gilmore.

Fascinated by the stars, young Gilmore picked up a “neat little book” at the Hutt Intermediate School library that taught him how to make a telescope.

“I saw the moon through that Mt Hutt telescope, and that was that”, Gilmore said.

By secondary school, Gilmore’s passion had turned into a real talent, and in 6th form, he was invited to help test out the best possible sites for the University of Pennsylvania to establish a southern observatory in New Zealand.

For Kilmartin, in the small country town where she grew up, “the sky was just part of the scenery”.

After “one book about the universe I found really very good reading”, she joined the Auckland Astronomical Society and learnt to apply photoelectric photometry: a process which measures the brightness of stars.

“But I never thought I could be an astronomer”, Kilmartin said.

Now, she has asteroids named after her; and the couple’s work has continued through five decades, one marriage, two children and one global pandemic.

When the Mt John Observatory closed during Covid-19, Gilmore and Kilmartin instead moved to their backyard, where they set up a telescope of their own.

The world might have stopped, but for this couple, work never did.

They continued to monitor our night sky, and for some months observations continued, carefully recorded by one University in Arizona, and one Lake Tekapo backyard; “the total sum of global astronomy”, said Gilmore.

Gilmore and Kilmartin will continue their nocturnal work at Mt John, “for just as long as we possibly can”, Kilmartin said. The couple are looking forward to many more years of work and of marriage.