Επιμέλεια: Ελένη Σοφού
By Tasos Kokkinidis
John Paraskevopoulos may not be a household name, but the Greek astrophysicist who had a moon’s crater named after him and discovered a couple of comets, made a significant contribution in our understanding of the universe by the middle of the 20th century.
“Dr. Paras” as he was known affectionately by scientists around the world, was born in Piraeus on June 20, 1889 and graduated from the University of Athens, where he obtained his PhD in Physics in 1910.
On his death in 1951, the London-based Royal Astronomical Society said in an obituary that “astronomy has lost one of its most devoted, conscientious and capable servants and a man who dedicated his life to providing for his colleagues precision tools and basic material for the exploration of the universe of stars and galaxies.”
Paraskevopoulos served in the Greek army during the Balkan Wars and World War I. He worked as an assistant to Professor 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.
In 1921, he returned to Athens where he became head of the astronomy department of the National Observatory with a goal to build 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 materialize.
So, in September 1923 he 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 from 1927 to 1951.
Source: Wikipedia
The crater Paraskevopoulos on the Moon is named after him.
It is an old lunar impact crater that is located on the far side of the Moon, in the higher northern latitudes. It lies just to the southwest of the younger and somewhat larger crater Carnot.
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