Kelly Beatty joined the staff of Sky & Telescope in 1974 and served as the editor of Night Sky, a spinoff magazine for beginning stargazers, in 2004–07. He retired from full-time work in 2018 but remains actively involved in many Sky & Telescope articles, tours, and other projects. Specializing in planetary science and space exploration, Kelly has been honored twice by the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society. In 2005 he received the Harold Masursky Award for meritorious service, and in 2009 he was honored with the inaugural Jonathan Eberhart Journalism Award. He is also a recipient of the American Geophysical Union’s Cowen Award for Sustained Achievement in Science Journalism (2009).

You’ll occasionally hear his interviews and guest commentaries on The Weather Channel and National Public Radio, and his work has appeared in numerous other magazines, newspapers, and encyclopedias. In fact, Kelly enjoys speaking to audiences of all ages and interest levels about his passion for astronomy. He observes when he can through one of his eight telescopes, and he is active nationally in the fight against light pollution.

Kelly hails from Madera, California. He holds a Bachelors degree in geology from the California Institute of Technology and a Master’s degree in science journalism from Boston University. During the 1980s he was among the first Western journalists to gain firsthand access to the Soviet space program. Asteroid 2925 Beatty was named on the occasion of his marriage in 1983, and in 1986 he was chosen one of the 100 semifinalists for NASA’s Journalist in Space program.
 

Juan Antonio Belmonte, Ph.D. ia Research Professor of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), where he lectures and investigates in exoplanetology and cultural astronomy. He holds a degree in Physics from the University of Barcelona and a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from the University of La Laguna, where he has also studied Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Prof. Belmonte has been Director of the Science and Cosmos Museum of Tenerife (MCC, 1995–2000), President of the European Society for Astronomy in Culture (SEAC, 2005–2011), the International Society for Archaeoastronomy and Astronomy in Culture (ISAAC, 2017–2020) and the Time Allocation Committee (CAT) of the Canary Islands Observatories (2003–2012). He received in 2012 the “Carlos Jaschek” Award in Cultural Astronomy for his contribution to the field. He is Advisory Editor of the Journal for the History of Astronomy.

He is author or co-author or more than 200 scientific papers and author or editor or more than 20 books on these topics, among them In Search of Cosmic Order: Selected Essays on Egyptian Archaeoastronomy (2009), with Mosalam Shaltout, and Pirámides, Templos y Estrellas: Arqueología y Astronomía en el Egipto Antiguo (2012, in Spanish). And just published in April of 2023, with José Lull, Astronomy of Ancient Egypt: a Cultural Perspective (click to download 50 excerpted pages).

For over a decade, he has been deeply involved in the development of the “Astronomy and World Heritage” initiative within UNESCO and the IAU. Since August 2021, he has been President of the IAU Commission C4 “World Heritage and Astronomy”. A tireless field researcher, he has carried out cultural astronomy fieldwork in the Megalithism of the Atlantic Façade, the Indian temples, Caral in Peru, Nabataean Petra, Hattusha in Turkey, Easter Island, and the Amazigh World from his base in the Canary Islands, among many other places.

Prof. Belmonte has been coordinator of the Egyptian-Spanish Mission for Archaeoastronomy of ancient Egypt and a member of the Spanish Archaeological Mission in Heracleopolis Magna. For 20 years, he has performed research fieldwork searching for and documenting astronomical relationships in more than one hundred archaeological sites in Egypt, from Nubia to the Delta, and from Siwa Oasis to Sherabit el Khadim, in the Sinai.
 

Dr. Denise M. Doxey is an Egyptologist and Curator of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian, and Near Eastern Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Denise received her M.Phil. in Classical Archaeology from Oxford University and her Ph.D. in Ancient History from the University of Pennsylvania. Her teaching experience includes Egyptology courses at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University. She has participated in excavations in Egypt at the sites of Abydos and Saqqara. In addition to numerous articles, she is the author or co-author of five books, most recently Arts of Ancient Nubia and Jewels of Ancient Nubia. She is a sought after lecturer for both academic conferences and public lectures. Currently, she is Vice President of the Board of Governors of the American Research Center in Egypt, the leading North American organization promoting research on Egyptian history and culture. She also serves on the Board of the International Council of Museum’s International Committee for Egyptology.

In her more than 25 years as a museum professional, Dr. Doxey has overseen the renovation of galleries for Predynastic and Early Dynastic art, Old Kingdom art, and Middle Kingdom funerary art. She curated special exhibitions, including co-curating Secrets of Tomb 10A: Egypt 2000 BC and serving as curator for Ancient Nubia Now. She is currently the curator for an international traveling exhibition featuring art of Nubia.