Hello and welcome to my website. I am an astronomer who works on the physics of quasars, but who also likes outreach, arts collaboration, and astronomical history. More recently I have become active in campaigning for space environmentalism. Follow the menu links to find out a little more about my scientific research, recent public engagement activity, teaching, and the books I have published. Below is a picture of me. It is of course outrageously dishonest, because its about ten years old and I am even uglier than that now.
I work at the Institute for Astronomy (IfA) of the University of Edinburgh, where I am the Regius Professor of Astronomy. My office is in the beautiful Royal Observatory Edinburgh (ROE), a historic site which, as well as the IfA, hosts the UK Astronomy Technology Centre, as well as amazing historical artefacts, and the ROE Visitor Centre.
The header picture is a small portion of the Orion Nebula at near-infrared wavelengths, imaged by the UKIRT Wide Field Camera.
My main social media channel these days is on Bluesky as @e-astronomer.bsky.social. Until recently I was gossiping on Twitter most days as the e_Astronomer, and occasionally masquerading as the long dead and notorious Charles Piazzi Smyth. Piazzi Smyth also has his own website (courtesy of yours truly). Last but not least I used to run a blog at wordpress.com. This is defunct, but contains many fun bits of writing that I must rescue from decay at some point!