Jacqueline Mitton's interest in astronomy began when she was a small child and she had her first telescope as a teenager. She graduated from the University of Oxford with a degree in physics, then obtained her PhD in astronomy at the University of Cambridge. In 1989 she became the Press Officer of the Royal Astronomical Society. She is the author or co-author of 16 astronomy books published since 1978, and writes for both children and adults. Her recent books include The Scholastic Encyclopedia of Space (with Simon Mitton, 1999), Pluto and Charon (with Alan Stern, Wiley, 1997 & 1999) and Zoo in the Sky (National Geographic, 1998).
