About Mark Thompson

Mark is the BBC One Show’s Astronomer and when not reporting for them, he is most likely writing about the sky or looking at it! You will often find him zooming in, on or through it as not only is Mark an enthusiastic astronomer but he is also a qualified pilot. Born in Norfolk he has had a fascination with all things in the sky ever since he was a small boy.

January 2011 saw Mark as part of the successful BBC Stargazing Live Presenting team, where he was pivotal in inspiring 3.62 million viewers to get out and enjoy the night sky.

Mark has been a contributor on the Sky at Night and The Culture Show. Currently, with the position of the Astronomy Presenter on BBC’s ‘The One Show’ this enables him an excellent opportunity to take astronomy into the living rooms of 5 million viewers at prime time!

He also regularly writes for Discovery.Com and a host of other astronomy and space websites.

Mark can also be heard also on the Lesley Dolphin Afternoon Show, at lunchtimes on 1st Thursday of each month, on BBC Radio Suffolk. Embracing social networking media, Mark ‘tweets’ regularly with thousands of followers and he is now working with a number of agencies on some exciting new projects for the coming years.

At the age of 10 he got his first view through a telescope; Saturn, rings and all, hanging there against a velvet black sky. It was for real, not a picture in a book, another world billions of miles away. It ignited a passion that has stayed with him ever since. As an astronomy populariser, he has been keen to show a new, enthusiastic and fresh face to the public and to that end has for the last 20 years, lectured on a vast array of astronomical subjects from the Moon to Black Holes and the end of the Universe. His research interests have chiefly centred on deep space, the study of stars exploding at the end of their lives and of distant galaxies believed to host super-massive black holes in their cores.

In his quest to show us a new image of astronomers, Mark, who is now President of Norwich Astronomical Society, has worked extensively with local media from newspaper, to radio and TV and his articles have been published in Astronomy Now, the UK’s national astronomy magazine. His enthusiastic outreach work and contemporary image led him to being elected to the Council of the Royal Astronomical Society in May 2010, the only amateur astronomer on the Council.