Unbound

Dr Robin Catchpole works as an astronomer at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, having retired as Senior Astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich in July 2004.

After obtaining a BSc at University College London, he was posted to the Royal Observatory at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, now known as the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO). He received his doctorate at the University of Cape Town and spent nearly quarter of a century in South Africa, working first at the Radcliffe Observatory in Pretoria and then at the SAAO in Cape Town.

He returned to the UK in the 1990s, first to Cambridge before moving to Greenwich as Senior Astronomer, where he was involved in the development of the new Astronomy Centre. There he also created the design of the Truncated Cone, clad in 33 tons of bronze, that covers the Peter Harrison Planetarium. The design is unique to the latitude of Greenwich and references significant astronomical directions.

Robin Catchpole has authored and co-authored over 100 research papers and articles and used a number of telescopes around the world including the Hubble Space Telescope. 

His research interests include the composition of stars, exploding stars, the structure of our Galaxy and galaxies with black holes at their centres. His current research interest is in the structure of the Bulge of our Milky Way Galaxy, as shown by Mira variables.