The University of Arizona Press
Brian May
Sir Brian May, CBE, PhD, ARCS, FRAS is a founding member of the rock group Queen, a world-renowned guitarist, songwriter, producer and performer, 3-D stereoscopic photographic authority, author, publisher, and passionate campaigner for animal rights. On graduating from Imperial College London in 1968 with a BSc (Hons) degree in physics, Brian began a PhD in Astrophysics, recording high-resolution spectra of the Zodiacal Light using a home-spun Fabry-Perot Spectrometer. In 1974, when his musical career with Queen took over, Brian was forced to shelve his PhD work, but in 2006, with the encouragement of Professor Michael Rowan Robinson, Professor Francisco Sanchez Martinez, Dr Garik Israelian, and Sir Patrick Moore, he returned to complete his studies. In 2007 Brian was awarded his full PhD degree in Astrophysics for his thesis: A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud. Thirty-seven years had elapsed between registration and submission of the PhD. He currently holds the post of visiting researcher at Imperial to continue his work in astronomy. He is also a co-founder of the planetary defense awareness campaign, Asteroid Day. In 2008 Asteroid 52665 Brianmay was named after him. His thesis was published by Springer Verlag in 2007, and he has since written, edited, or published fourteen other books on Astronomy, Queen, and Stereophotography.
In 2015, Brian was appointed Science Team Collaborator by the New Horizon’s Principal Investigator Alan Stern, co-producing the world’s first stereo images of Pluto and Kuiper Belt Object Arrokoth. To celebrate the latter encounter, in response to an invitation from New Horizons’ PI Alan Stern, Brian composed and released a single called New Horizons on New Year’s Day 2019. In 2018 he worked with the Rosetta mission’s Matt Taylor and Joel Parker to create, along with his astro-collaborator Claudia Manzoni, the first stereo images of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. In Spring 2019, working with NASA’s Professor Dante Lauretta using the data from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, Brian and Claudia created the first stereo images of the asteroid Bennu and were adopted as Science Team Collaborators for this mission.
In 2015, Brian was appointed Science Team Collaborator by the New Horizon’s Principal Investigator Alan Stern, co-producing the world’s first stereo images of Pluto and Kuiper Belt Object Arrokoth. To celebrate the latter encounter, in response to an invitation from New Horizons’ PI Alan Stern, Brian composed and released a single called New Horizons on New Year’s Day 2019. In 2018 he worked with the Rosetta mission’s Matt Taylor and Joel Parker to create, along with his astro-collaborator Claudia Manzoni, the first stereo images of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. In Spring 2019, working with NASA’s Professor Dante Lauretta using the data from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, Brian and Claudia created the first stereo images of the asteroid Bennu and were adopted as Science Team Collaborators for this mission.
