Professor John Parkinson

Professor John Parkinson is the Professor of Astrophysics at Sheffield Hallam University. As a world famous space scientist, John has always been fascinated with space and has flown instruments to observe the sun on many spacecraft, including the NASA Space Shuttle. The objectives of this work were to learn how the corona, the sun's outer atmosphere, is heated up to temperatures of several million degrees and to discover exactly what it is made of.is the Director of Science and Mathematics at Sheffield Hallam University. As a world famous space scientist, John has always been fascinated with space and has flown instruments to observe the sun on many spacecraft, including the NASA Space Shuttle. The objectives of this work were to learn how the corona, the sun's outer atmosphere, is heated up to temperatures of several million degrees and to discover exactly what it is made of.

Professor Parkinson has led eclipse expeditions all over the world, seeing ten total eclipses and so many partial eclipses he claims he's lost count. From Siberia to Sumatra and Hawaii to Borneo, he's seen them all. His expedition to observe the 1998 eclipse from Curacao in the Caribbean was the subject of the BBC TV documentary 'Shadow Chasers' and this has now been shown in many countries around the world. John was the lead scientist for BBC TV's live coverage of the 1999 eclipse, which attracted a record-breaking 13 million viewers. In November 2003 he set out on his most ambitious expedition to date - to Antarctica to be the first person ever to observe a total eclipse from the great white continent. Besides his work on eclipses John is also a failed astronaut and the proud owner of a Blue Peter badge. He has appeared on television many times and can easily be identified by his brightly coloured waistcoats and eye-catching T-shirts.