Greek astronomers

Dionysis Simopoulos (Greek: Διονύσης Σιμόπουλος; 8 March 1943 – 7 August 2022) was the Eugenides Planetarium's director emeritus who excelled as an astronomy educator and science populariser in the print and electronic media of Greece.

Francesco Maurolico (Latin: Franciscus Maurolycus; Italian: Francesco Maurolico; Greek: Φραγκίσκος Μαυρόλυκος, 16 September 1494 - 21/22 July 1575) was a mathematician and astronomer from Sicily. He made contributions to the fields of geometry, optics, conics, mechanics, music, and astronomy. He edited the works of classical authors including Archimedes, Apollonius, Autolycus, Theodosius and Serenus. He also composed his own unique treatises on mathematics and mathematical science.

Seleucus of Seleucia (Greek: Σέλευκος Seleukos; c. 190 BC - c. 150 BC) was a Hellenistic astronomer and philosopher. Coming from Seleucia on the Tigris, Mesopotamia, the capital of the Seleucid Empire, or, alternatively, Seleukia on the Erythraean Sea, he is best known as a proponent of heliocentrism and for his theory of the origin of tides.

John Stefanos Paraskevopoulos (June 20, 1889 – March 15, 1951) also known as John Paras, was a Greek/South African astronomer. He was born in Piraeus, Greece and graduated from the University of Athens, where he obtained his PhD in Physics in 1910, under the supervision of Timoleon A. Argyropoulos. His thesis was entitled "Variability in absorption spectra". He served in the Greek army during the Balkan Wars and World War I. He work as an assistant of Prof. Demetrios Eginitis at the National Observatory of Athens, and in 1919, he went to the US with a two-year fellowship, spending part of that time working at Yerkes Observatory. There he met and married Dorothy W. Block. In 1921, he returned to Athens where he became head of the astronomy department of the National Observatory of Athens with a goal to built a large telescope in Greece. However, due to the war between Greece and Turkey during that period and the political instability that followed it soon became evident that the large telescope for the observatory would not materialise. So, in September 1923 Dr Paras accepted an offer from Dr Harlow Shapley, to become the Superintendent of the Harvard Observatory's Southern Station. He left this post due to a lack of funding and went to Arequipa, Peru to work at Boyden Station, a branch of Harvard Observatory, with a view to finding a more suitable location for it. The decision was made to move Boyden Station to South Africa due to better weather conditions, and Paraskevopoulos served there as director of Boyden Observatory in South Africa from 1927 to 1951. He co-discovered a couple of comets. The crater Paraskevopoulos on the Moon is named after him.

Eugène Michel Antoniadi (Greek: Ευγένιος Αντωνιάδης) (1 March 1870 – 10 February 1944) was a Greek-French astronomer.

Demetrios Kokkidis (Greek:Δημήτριος Κοκκίδης; November 4, 1840 - February 11, 1896) was an astronomer, mathematician, physicist, professor, and dean. Kokkidis was the fourth president of the Athens Observatory after the death of Johann Friedrich Julius Schmidt. He was one of the few Greek astronomers of the 20th century following Georgios Konstantinos Vouris and Ioannis Papadakis. He did extensive research and wrote articles about Mercury, the Sun, the Moon, and various meteorological phenomena.

Stavros Plakidis Greek: Σταύρος Πλακίδης; May 22, 1893 – January 1, 1991) was an astronomer, professor, astrophysicist, mathematician, author, and director of the Astronomical Institute of the National Observatory of Athens and intermittently served as chairman of the National Observatory. He is considered the father of modern astronomy in Greece. Plakidis made systematic observations of variable stars, novae, planets (Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mercury), minor planets, stellar parallaxes, orbits of comets, and double stars, also contributing to the accurate geographic coordinates of the Athens Observatory. Plakidas independently discovered V1500 Cygni several hours after Minoru Honda claimed the find in Japan.

Paul Santorini (Greek:Παύλος Σαντορίνης; 1893 – 1986) was a Greek civil engineer, experimental and theoretical physicist, mathematician, electrical engineer, astronomer, author, and professor. He published over 350 articles and conducted research in the fields of solar energy, wind energy, electromagnetic microwaves as weapons of war, high-frequency electromagnetic waves, high-frequency currents, structural engineering, and hydraulics. Later in life, he wrote papers in the field of the birth of the universe and proposed the multiple successive small bangs theory of the universe. Some of his papers also dealt with mankind and the universe. He is known within the UFO conspiracy community because of his involvement in the 1946 Ghost rockets incident in Greece.

John Seiradakis (Greek: Ιωάννης-Χιου Σειραδάκης; 5 March 1948 – 3 May 2020) was a Greek astronomer and professor emeritus at the Department of Physics of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He is best known for his contributions in the understanding of radio pulsars, the galactic center and archaeoastronomy. Since the early 2000s he was heavily involved in the decoding of the Antikythera mechanism. He was a founding member of the Hellenic Astronomical Society, the European Astronomical Society and the International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics (IOAA).

Vassiliki Kalogera is a Greek astrophysicist. She is a professor at Northwestern University and the Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA). She is a leading member of the LIGO Collaboration that observed gravitational waves in 2015.