Kenneth Phillips

He/Him

I am gay and I am an astronomer.//

 

I am a gay retired solar physicist still research-active. I graduated from University College London, completing my PhD in 1972. I was a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center studying X-ray flares, with a further year at the University of Hawai’i. I returned to the UK as a senior researcher at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory where I worked on NASA’s Solar Maximum Mission, which had instruments studying solar flares. I also contributed to the topic of coronal heating by developing a white-light imager that was taken to several total solar eclipses. Our team attracted media attention, being the subject of a BBC program.

I later worked on RHESSI, another NASA solar flare spacecraft, studying element abundances, a subject I still pursue with Polish collaborators.

My books include Guide to the Sun (1992) and a textbook with two co-authors on solar spectra (2003).

My collaboration with Polish astronomers resulted in being awarded the Gold Medal of the University of Wroclaw (2009) and the Copernicus Medal of the Polish Academy of Sciences (2010).

I co-authored a 2021 article for Astronomy and Geophysics about my recollection of Frank Kameny, celebrated gay astronomer, and my personal experiences as a gay astronomer myself.