Mark E. Bailey

Prof. Mark Bailey MBE was born in England and was educated at Universities of Cambridge (BA, 1974), Sussex (MSc, 1975) and Edinburgh (PhD, 1978). His work has touched on a number of topics, but his main work has been on studying the origin and dynamical evolution of comets and other Small Bodies of the Solar System. He added the Human Orrery to the Observatory grounds; an interactive model of the Solar System providing a unique investigation of planetary motion. He also has a great interest in the meteorology; astronomer John Butler oversaw the Met Records Project at the turn of the millenium, compiling, digitising and calibrating over two centuries of meteorological observations at Armagh Observatory. Two successive automated weather stations were added during his tenure here, as well as the first major new telescope at the Observatory in nearly a century: the Armagh Robotic Telescope (ART) in 2011.