[FOTZeiss] Fw: Rare Interview w/ Robert Burnham, Jr. from 1983

[Glenn A. Walsh]

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gaw

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--- On Sat, 6/18/11, LARRY KLAES <ljk4 at MSN.COM> wrote:

> From: LARRY KLAES <ljk4 at MSN.COM>
> Subject: A rare interview with Robert Burnham, Jr. from 1983
> To: HASTRO-L at listserv.wvu.edu
> Date: Saturday, June 18, 2011, 4:16 AM

> "Robert Burnham Jr.'s 1983 Testament:
> An 
> Astronomer-Recluse Inscribes His Universe"
> 
> Part I
> 
> by 
> 
> Tony Ortega 
> 
> June 16th, 
> 2011
> 
> Village 
> Voice
> 
> Today, June 16, 
> 2011, would have been Robert Burnham Jr.'s 80th birthday.
> 
> Burnham was an 
> Arizona astronomer who produced one of the most unusual,
> and most beloved, set 
> of books of science, his Burnham's Celestial 
> Handbook: An Observer's Guide to the Universe Beyond the
> Solar System. He 
> began putting it out as a series of loose-leaf notebooks in
> the mid-1960s. The 
> full, 2,000-page, typewritten, bound three-volume set was
> later published in 
> 1978 and became an instant classic among people who enjoy
> looking up at the 
> night sky with small telescopes. The books are something of
> a small miracle, 
> with mountains of information, inspirational reading, and
> pure scientific 
> passion.
> 
> Burnham 
> himself, however, was something of a recluse and rarely
> gave interviews. The 
> only lengthy piece of writing he did about himself he
> produced at the height of 
> his Handbook's popularity, in 1982, for Astronomy magazine.
> But among his papers 
> was found another version of the essay nearly four times as
> long, dated April 
> 1983, which the Voice is publishing today for the very
> first time 
> anywhere.
> 
> In 1997, a 
> story I did for the Phoenix New Times revealed for the
> first time that Burnham 
> had died in 1993. After his fascinating and illustrious
> career at Flagstaff's 
> Lowell Observatory had ended in 1979, Burnham had fallen on
> hard times. In the 
> last years of his life, he was living in a cheap residence
> hotel in downtown San 
> Diego, selling paintings of cats in Balboa Park. I learned
> that he had, at one 
> time during his later years, approached the director of
> Balboa Park's 
> planetarium, but the director didn't believe that the old
> man in the park could 
> have been the famous Robert Burnham Jr.
> 
> If Burnham's 
> life ended in an unfortunate fashion, in the following
> essay you will meet the 
> man at his most beguiling, a largely self-taught polymath
> who could be both 
> playful and cantankerous. Nearly three decades since he put
> these words down, 
> his ideas about progress, science and religion, and man's
> future in space still 
> seem fresh. We hope you find his words illuminating. --
> Tony Ortega, Editor, 
> The Village Voice.
> 
> 
> An Interview with the author of 
> The Celestial Handbook

> http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2011/06/robert-burnham-jr-astronomer.html