SINACHOPOULOS, Dimitris

Born in Greece in 1951, Dimitris Sinachopoulos studied Mathematics at National & Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece (B.A., 1975), Astronomy and Archaeoastronomy at the University of Vienna, Austria (Ph.D. 1983) and Byzantine Studies at the same University. He studied Archaeoastronomy with Prof. Firneis and Prof. Ferrari d’Occhieppo. He was post-doc researcher at the Univ. of Bonn (1984-1989) and the Royal Observatory of Belgium (1989-1998) working on Earth-bound and space Astrometry (ESA «Hipparcos» and «Gaia» and DLR «DIVA» satellites). Since 1998 he has been a Senior Researcher at the National Observatory of Atherns (NOA), Greece. He has spent more than two years of his activities performing astronomical and astrophysical observational research at the largest international astronomical observatories, including the Chilean La Silla (ESO), Las Campanas and Cerro Tololo, the Canary Island La Palma and the South African SAAO. In 2000, he founded the new Greek NOA observatory at the top of the Helmos mountain (altitude 2300m), installing there the newest and largest Greek 2.3m telescope. He has published a series of papers on the field, mainly on Plato’s view on Astronomy, the Byzantine Astronomer Leon the Mathematician (8th Cent.) and astronomical orientation of ancient Greek monuments. He gave a series of lectures on Archaeoastronomy at the Univ. of Sao Paulo (Brazil) in 2011. He introduced in Greece the use of the Astrogeodetic method for the orientation of ancient and Byzantine monuments. He supervised the first such Ph.D. thesis on the field (Pantazis, 2004) on the astronomical orientations of the churches of the  Meteora Monasteries. Since 2009, he has been the director of the Nea Lesbos Observatory.