Leon Mestel (5 August 1927 – 15 September 2017)[2] was a British-Australian astronomer and astrophysicist and Emeritus Professor at the University of Sussex.

He was educated at West Ham Secondary School, London, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he obtained his BA in 1948 and his PhD in 1952.

[7] He married Sylvia Louise Cole (d. 2014)[2] in 1951, and they had two sons, Ben and Jonathan and two daughters Rosie and Leo.

[7] This time at Cambridge included a period as a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, during the academic year of 1961–2.

[7] The fourth and final stage of his career was as professor of astronomy at the University of Sussex, a position he took up in 1973 and held for nineteen years.

Those for whom Mestel wrote obituaries and articles include Martin Schwarzschild,[3][20] Roger John Tayler,[6][21][22] William McCrea,[4][23] Hermann Bondi,[24] Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar,[25][26] and Thomas George Cowling.