Anthony G Richards works in the Optical Systems group of the Space Science and Technology Department at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory located in Oxfordshire, England. After taking a B.Sc. degree in Physics from Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London, he studied plasma spectroscopy and then moved into solar physics with his first employment at the Astrophysics Research Unit based at the Culham Laboratory in Oxfordshire. There he helped design and build EUV instruments flown on sounding rockets to observe the solar photosphere and corona. Having moved to the Rutherford Laboratory in 1980, he now has 26 years experience in the design, analysis, building and testing of EUV, optical and IR instrumentation for space satellites. Gradual specialisation in looking for and controlling stray light in space optical systems (no one else wanted the job!) lead to the designing of some star tracker/stray light shade combinations. He has contributed many paper studies of stray light aspects of space instrument designs and has also designed stray light shades for space instruments such as ATSR, launched on ERS-1, AATSR (an advanced version of ATSR) and designed the stray light control arrangements inside the Coronal Diagnostic Spectrometer (CDS), one of the SOHO’s instruments, and inside the LWS instrument on ISO. He also designed the baffle systems for the GERB instruments to be flown on the MSG series of earth-observing satellites.