Soneva Stars

Dr James O’Donoghue is a planetary astronomer at the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and prior to this he worked at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. His research involves the astronomy of Giant Planets Jupiter, Saturn and exoplanets. His recent astronomical discoveries have made global news: Saturn’s rings aren’t going to last forever — they are falling into the upper atmosphere, and Jupiter’s aurora heats the entire planet. James has a passion for educating people about the wonders of space: he creates space science-themed animations which are used in schools, planetariums, universities and museums globally. These videos have over 200 million views across Twitter, Youtube and other platforms, gaining him nearly 200,000 followers on the Twitter account “@physicsJ”. During his visit, James will be hosting after-dinner stargazing sessions, along with talks about astronomy throughout the day.

Born in 1986 in the Czech Republic, Petr studied astrophysics at Masaryk University Brno and at Silesian University in Opava, Czech Republic. He is an astronomer and astrophotographer. His images were featured more than 30 times by NASA as Astronomy Picture of the Day, as astrophotographer and science outreach worker he cooperates with NOIRLab, National Geographics’ TWAN (The World At Night), European Southern Observatory, and many more. An asteroid 6822 orbiting between Mars and Jupiter is named after him. He travels the world to capture and show the immersive beauty of the starry sky and unique or rare sky phenomena. A long route brought him also to Soneva Fushi in 2019, where he experienced a beautiful night sky and took many photographs of it. Petr specializes in the outreach of modern astronomy with his talks to the public and in photographing the night sky phenomena to show what amazing Universe around us can be even seen by naked eyes all around the world, including the Maldives.