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Robert Burnham, Jr. (June 16, 1931 – March 20, 1993) was an American astronomer. He is best known for writing the classic three-volume Burnham’s Celestial Handbook.

Early work

Burnham was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1931. His family moved to Prescott, Arizona in 1940, and he graduated from high school there in 1949. That was the culmination of his formal education. Always a shy person, he had few friends, never married, and spent most of his time observing with his home-built telescope.

In the fall of 1957 he received considerable local publicity when he discovered his first comet. This led to his being hired by Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona in 1958 to work on a survey of stellar proper motion using a blink comparator. While Burnham was working at Lowell, he and his co-worker, Norman G. Thomas, discovered five more comets (including 56P/Slaughter-Burnham), and numerous asteroids.

Celestial Handbook

In addition to his regular duties at the observatory, Burnham spent almost all of his free time working on the Celestial Handbook. His writing and his book were never officially supported by Lowell Observatory. Subtitled “An Observer’s Guide to the Universe Beyond the Solar System”, the 2,138 page Burnham’s Celestial Handbook combines a lengthy introduction to astronomy with catalog information for every constellation in the sky. Hundreds of photographic plates, tables, charts, and diagrams are included along with a vast amount of scientific and observing information, star lore, history, and even a little poetry. Thousands of stars and deep sky objects visible in small telescopes are covered in meticulous detail.

Originally self-published in a loose-leaf serial format beginning in 1966, and with a revised edition by Dover Publications in 1978, the Celestial Handbook was well reviewed in amateur astronomy magazines and became a best seller in a very specialized field. It is still in print (ISBN 0-486-23567-X, ISBN 0-486-23568-8, ISBN 0-486-23673-0) and is considered to be a classic in the literature of amateur astronomy.

After Lowell

In April of 1979, the year after his book was published by Dover, Burnham received notice that the proper motion survey would soon be completed and that the observatory could not afford to keep him on in the position he had long held. Despite months of warning, he failed to make other arrangements and, after twenty-one years at Lowell, his job ended in December of that year. Unwilling to take the only position that was offered to him, that of janitor at the observatory, he left.

Burnham was never able to recover personally, professionally, or financially after he lost the job at Lowell. Over the next few years, while sales of the Celestial Handbook were rapidly growing, Burnham’s personal circumstances were steadily worsening. His shyness increased and he shunned all publicity, becoming even more reclusive. He bickered often with Dover about royalties and about possible new editions or translations of his book.

He also seemed to become more bitter and depressed, isolating himself even further from his few friends and his family. Beginning in 1985, Burnham lived for a time in Phoenix, Arizona, but in May of 1986 he left Phoenix and dropped out of sight completely, informing no one but his publisher of his whereabouts.

Later years

Despite being the author of a successful book, Burnham spent the last years of his life in poverty and obscurity in San Diego, California, selling his paintings of cats at Balboa Park. His many devoted readers were completely unaware of his personal circumstances, in large part, because most people assumed that a different and unrelated Robert Burnham, who was an editor at Astronomy magazine, was the author of Burnham’s Celestial Handbook.

The real author died destitute and alone at the age of sixty-one. His family did not learn about his death (apparently by his choice) until two years later and didn’t report it to the press even then because they were unaware of his stature in the amateur astronomy community.

After his death, it was realized that he had often attended programs presented by the San Diego Astronomy Association (at the Ruben H. Fleet Space Theater in Balboa Park) without anyone recognizing him. In spite of the tragedy of his later years, Robert Burnham, Jr. continues to be remembered by a generation of deep sky observers for his unique Celestial Handbook.

Norm Thomas, Burnham’s former co-worker at Lowell Observatory, had told Burnham that he planned to name an asteroid after him, but there was a problem. An asteroid already carried the name Burnham: 834 Burnhamia, named after the unrelated 19th century astronomer Sherburne Wesley Burnham. Thomas remembered that Burnham had told him that in Germany his father’s parents had gone by the name Bernheim, so that’s the name Thomas used to honour his longtime co-worker. 3467 Bernheim was discovered on September 26, 1981.

The creamated remains of Robert ‘Bob’ Burnham, Jr. are interred at the Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in San Diego, California.

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Robert Burnham, Jr. biography

Stargazers revere Arizona Robert Burnham Jr., creator of the most complete, practical, inspirational book ever written about the night sky. But like so many people of genius, he would spend his last years alone and destitute.

By Tony Ortega        Article Published Sep 25, 1997

The old man who sold paintings of cats in Balboa Park entered San Diego’s Mercy Hospital on March 9, 1993.

He was dying of congestive heart failure, the result of a heart attack that he’d suffered weeks earlier.

Although he was only 62, his years in the park had prematurely aged him. He wore a beard, and his skin was tanned by his exposure to the sun. He was thin.

He suffered from several ailments. A blood clot in his heart. Gangrene in one foot. Pneumonia in his lungs. For days he lingered, but doctors decided not to take the risk of operating on him.

At 6:03 p.m. on March 20, the man’s heart stopped beating.

Days later his body was sent to a military cemetery for cremation after a check on his social security number revealed that he had served in the Air Force. A marble headstone bearing his name was placed on a wall among the names of other cremated veterans at Point Loma’s Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery.

No one noticed that the name on the headstone was misspelled, the result of a clerical error on the man’s death certificate.

No one at the hospital or at the cemetery knew the man, and no family members attended the placement of his cenotaph.

He was just a weather-beaten, penniless man who sold paintings of cats in Balboa Park who had grown old and died.

Years before he was a destitute painter, Robert Burnham Jr. had inscribed the universe. Writer, astronomer, finder of comets and asteroids and collector of ancient artifacts, Burnham was a singular Arizonan.

He was a scientist whose work at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff helped advance the understanding of the sun’s neighborhood in space.

He was an author whose name has become so familiar to some readers it has become a sort of shorthand, like Audubon to birders, Hoyle to card players, Webster to poor spellers, Robert to parliamentarians.

More than 30 years after its first publication, Burnham’s Celestial Handbook: An Observer’s Guide to the Universe Beyond the Solar System remains a sort of real-life hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy, a compendium with something to say about nearly every cosmic destination worth visiting.

Part travel guide, part history text, part encyclopedia, it’s like a handheld natural-history museum of the universe. And for decades it’s held a grip on the imaginations of most people who ply the night skies with telescopes, people who yearn to travel in space and know that they can, any dark and clear night.

Reading Burnham’s massive, three-volume work is like reading the notes of an adventurer who has spent a lifetime studying the treasures of a lost civilization: Its 2,138 pages are loaded with tables of data, technical passages and illustrations interspersed with historical arcana and ancient poetry. And all of it is meant as an incentive for the reader to recover those treasures by merely looking upward.

It is rarely compared to other books because there simply is none other like it. No other popular work approaches its utility and completeness; few other scientific texts contain its sense of wonder and even spirituality.

Despite Burnham’s abiding fame among skywatchers, few people knew much about the man himself. Partly, that was because of confusion over another man with the same name. An editor at a science magazine, the other Robert Burnham published frequently during the same period that the Celestial Handbook gained popularity, causing readers to assume that the two were one and the same.

But Robert Burnham Jr. published almost nothing else besides his Handbook, and shunned publicity.

He led an extraordinary, but ultimately tragic, life. He also was a bundle of contradictions.

Burnham was a recluse, and yet he craved public recognition. He devoted years of labor to extraordinary, disciplined work, and yet he was incapable of staving off poverty. He was a brilliant writer who had an uncommon memory, yet words failed him in social situations.

He knew the night sky like few other people have, but was oblivious to earthly concerns.

He felt betrayed by his publisher and others who had benefited from his years of remarkable work, and he sank into depression and bitterness at the same time his reputation soared.

His books are revered by tens of thousands, yet he died alone and unnoticed.
And that’s apparently just what he wanted.
After vanishing from his Phoenix home in 1986, he resisted attempts by his family to communicate with him. His sister, Phoenix resident Viola Courtney, only learned of her brother’s death after he had been dead for two years, and it took her nearly a year longer to find out where he had died. She didn’t communicate the news of her brother’s death to the community of readers who know his name well.

She had little idea he was still so admired.
Astronomers across the country register shock that Burnham could have been dead so long without the knowledge of the scientific community.

For many of them, professional and amateur alike, Burnham’s books are among their most prized possessions.

The Celestial Handbook, Burnham’s legacy, began life as a project he meant only for himself, a young Prescott shipping clerk with only a high school education.

But one night in 1957, he made a discovery from the front porch of his parents’ house that would bring him to the attention of state media and Lowell Observatory’s astronomers.

It also piqued the interest of an ambitious Arizona senator with his eyes on the White House who made a point of visiting the clever young man a few weeks later.

That visit would help launch Burnham on a remarkable trajectory which would end, eventually, in penury and anonymity.

On the night of October 18, 1957, eager to use the newest of his telescopes despite its lack of a proper mount, the 26-year-old Burnham propped up its tube against the porch railings of his parents’ Prescott home.

As on other nights, he used the instrument to scrutinize tiny portions of the sky, doggedly searching for items to include in a massive survey of the heavens that he had taken upon himself.

And it’s likely that as Burnham slowly examined multiple-star systems in the constellation of Cetus the whale, inside the house his mother sat at her desk, writing letters. She was part of a dying breed: people who develop reputations for writing letters to newspapers. Lydia Burnham voraciously devoured papers and fired off missives about politics and religion–”She was a fanatical nonbeliever,” says her daughter Viola Courtney–which were regularly printed and won her an army of far-flung correspondents.

She had gained particular influence with the editors of her hometown paper, the Prescott Courier, and in the coming days, she would use it.

That night, at 10:30 p.m., Burnham’s telescope found a smudge of light where there was not supposed to be one.

It was a comet, a celestial interloper speeding past the Earth in one of the nearest approaches of a comet in 50 years.

Although it was his first such discovery, Burnham knew what to do: He made a phone call to Lowell Observatory and sent a telegram to Harvard University.

The astronomers at Lowell didn’t try to confirm Burnham’s find until the following night. But by then clouds had scudded in over Flagstaff and would remain the next night as well.

Instead, a Swiss observatory acting on the sighting of Paul Wild, a comet hunter in Bern who had spotted the object a few hours before Burnham, grabbed credit for confirming the existence of the object. Fortunately, because Burnham had sent a telegram to Harvard, where the world’s arbiters of astronomical discoveries were located, Burnham’s observation was credited as well.

Comet Latyshev-Wild-Burnham would eventually gain its third name when a delayed report from a Russian astronomer–who had actually beaten the other two–arrived weeks later.

Today, about 30 new comets are found each year, mostly by professionals in the course of their work. A handful, however, are snared by amateurs. While a few of those discoveries become news items–such as Phoenix resident Tom Bopp’s 1995 co-discovery of the spectacular Comet Hale-Bopp–most go unnoticed by the nonastronomical world. In the 1950s, fewer comets were found, and amateurs played a greater role in spotting them. But even then, most discoveries did not excite the media, especially for an object such as Burnham’s which could not be seen by the unaided eye.

Arizona newspapers, however, hailed Burnham as a hero.
Stories began appearing October 28 in the Arizona Republic and the Phoenix Gazette as well as the Courier, which treated Burnham as something of a celebrity. The paper would consult him in future stories on celestial events as Prescott’s home-grown astronomer. Partly, that treatment may have been because of his mother’s relationship with the paper’s editors.

Another reason for the attention was surely Lowell Observatory’s promotion of the story. Perhaps embarrassed that his colleagues had not confirmed Burnham’s find themselves, Lowell’s Henry Giclas mailed a congratulatory but apologetic letter to the amateur on October 24. The observatory then notified the press.

American paranoia about Russian superiority may also have boosted coverage. At least one news story presented Burnham’s ingenuity as a sort of Yankee comeback to Sputnik, the Soviet satellite which was then orbiting the Earth and unsettling the stomachs of hawkish Cold Warriors.

Particularly, one of the most hawkish of all.
Senator Barry Goldwater descended on Burnham on November 7. Their meeting was taped by a local radio station and preserved in the Courier.

“The Senator was quite intrigued to learn that someone with a home-built telescope had beaten the professionals to a ‘major astronomical discovery,’ as he put it,” Burnham would write years later. “But he was really fascinated by my account of the optical test of my telescope mirror. Here I was, measuring the curve on a mirror to an accuracy of a few hundred-thousandths of an inch, with equipment made from an old tin can and a razor blade.”

Goldwater was genuinely intrigued by Burnham’s feat, but he couldn’t help but make political hay out of the encounter. His comments were dutifully reported the next day: “It is exciting that Burnham . . . could use the talent God gave him, and not depend on doles from the federal government to make such progress,” said the conservative icon.

The senator surprised Burnham by offering him a telescope owned by his late uncle, Morris Goldwater, who had once been Prescott’s mayor. It was a valuable refractor which the elder Goldwater had purchased in 1882.

Burnham gladly accepted, promising to refurbish the old instrument.
“If I find another comet, I will name it after you, Senator,” Burnham said, making a promise he couldn’t possibly keep.

Only three months later, Burnham found another comet with his homemade telescope.

It was not named Comet Goldwater.
The first comet discovered in 1958, it would, according to standard scientific protocol, carry the names of its discoverers. In this case, that was a single person.

It is known as Comet Burnham 1958a.

Burnham’s meeting with Goldwater is preserved in yellowing newspaper clippings assembled in a faded green photo album. Other pages commemorate five of Burnham’s six comet discoveries.

Burnham put the album together himself and annotated it. It’s now in the possession of Viola Courtney, his sister, who lives in north Phoenix.

She has many of Burnham’s things, and one by one she brings out the pieces of his life to share them.

She resembles him. The same narrow face, dark hair and thin build. She is 64.

The two of them were born in Chicago: He on June 16, 1931, she two years later. The Burnhams relocated to Prescott in 1940 out of concern for their mother’s health. Robert Sr., a General Electric employee, followed three years later after he found work at the Iron King mine.

Both of their parents were outgoing and gregarious, Courtney says, which always made her wonder where her brother obtained his introversion.

“At school, they nicknamed him ‘Professor,’” she says. (His family’s nickname for him, however, was “Cosmo.”) He excelled in class, but didn’t make friends easily. Mostly, the two of them kept to themselves. Courtney’s brother’s powerful imagination could keep her entertained for hours. “He and I were real close as kids. He drew up a scroll with magic islands when he was 11 and I was 9. ‘Where do you want to go today?’ he’d ask.”

As teens, Courtney says, the two drifted apart. She spent more time with friends, while Burnham became increasingly absorbed in myriad interests–astronomy, geology, music, ancient history and drawing among them.

“He had a couple of good friends, but otherwise he kept to himself,” she says.

He had constructed a laboratory where he kept his growing collections of coins and rocks and artifacts, and where he performed experiments.

By the time Burnham entered high school, astronomy had become his main interest. But he told his sister that he didn’t plan to make a profession of it.

“He didn’t want to do the math. He was an observer. He really didn’t want to go into all of the mechanics of it,” she says.

Consumed by interests but with no practical ambition, Burnham graduated from Prescott Senior High School in 1949 and retreated to his laboratory.

“Back then it wasn’t so automatic that you go to college. As for Robert, there wasn’t money for it, anyway,” Courtney says.

So, for a couple of years, he did nothing, which was fine with his father.
Robert Burnham Sr. preferred that his children stay in his house. Lydia, however, wanted her son to do something besides work on his hobbies. She pushed him to get a job.

“Who’s going to pay me for anything I can do?” Courtney remembers her brother saying.

The war in Korea would force him to act. Faced with being drafted, he enlisted in the Air Force in 1951. The airman first class became a radar technician, traveled to exotic locales like Saudi Arabia, and, after his four-year stint, returned to the laboratory attached to his parents’ house.

“He was given an honorable discharge and then came back to Prescott to go back to doing nothing,” Courtney says.

Until, that is, his mother heard about an opening for a shipping clerk at Thunderbird Fashions, a Western clothing manufacturer.

“They checked applicants for school records, so he got it hands down. He was their best shipping clerk, ever,” Courtney says. “It didn’t make sense. He was so capable. I told him he should have stayed in the military. It fit him because the military took care of the mundane decisions and allowed him free time to pursue his interests.”

But Burnham seemed content. His nowhere job kept his mother happy and put change in his pocket, and his nights were free for the passion that was taking up more and more of his time: his Celestial Survey, as he called it.

He had conceived of it shortly after he returned from his assignment in the Air Force. Using a small refractor telescope, he became frustrated that the star charts available at the time came with so little information about all the intriguing symbols dotting the maps.

Here were thousands of objects of interest in the sky–multiple star systems, stars that changed brightness, clusters of stars, nebulae and distant galaxies–and little information about any of them. So Burnham began making his own notes about them, organizing the notes by constellation and recording them in loose-leaf notebooks which grew and multiplied.

By the end of 1957, he was using a larger telescope of his own construction, he’d made news as the discoverer of a comet, and his survey had grown to fill six notebooks and 1,200 pages.

And that’s when, despite his prediction to his sister, he indeed became a professional astronomer.

Henry Giclas has seen many people come and go in the 56 years he’s been associated with Lowell Observatory. Yet the 87-year-old still goes to his office there every weekday, and it’s no trouble for him to remember the details of hiring Robert Burnham.

“Anybody that spends a lot of time out looking for comets, first of all he has to have a lot of patience, and he has to want to take the time to do it. And so I just figured that anyone who would spend that much time would make a pretty good observer for a routine job.”

An article without a byline which appeared February 3, 1958, in the Courier described how Burnham got the post: “H.L. Giclas, of the Lowell Observatory, passing through Prescott, took Burnham to lunch, and invited him to visit the Flagstaff observatory over the following weekend. Soon after he returned home, he received the offer of the position in the observatory. The camera studies he will make are expected to take a two year period, Burnham said. . . . He will begin his work on Feb. 10.”

Courtney remembers her mother telling Burnham: “If you turn this down, you’re crazy.”

“I’m not going to turn it down,” he answered.
He accepted the job at $6,000 a year with the likelihood that it would last only the two years of the project.

Then, Giclas says, the entire deal nearly fell through.
The February 3 Courier article infuriated the astronomers at Lowell. Always sensitive about Lowell’s reputation, they did not appreciate that Burnham had spoken about his upcoming job without the observatory’s approval.

“We had a bit of trouble about that article in the Courier. His mother, you know, was a kind of jackleg reporter for it,” Giclas says.

“He damned near didn’t get the job. We thought he’d written that article.” They changed their minds, says Giclas, after a contrite Burnham convinced them that he hadn’t written it.

“It was his mother. When I offered him that job, his mother went bonkers and wrote up a big story about how he was going to do a proper motion program at the Lowell Observatory when the guy didn’t even know what a proper motion was.”

It wasn’t the first time the observatory had hired a skilled amateur on the cheap for repetitive work that better-paid professionals might have scorned.

In 1929, a young Kansas farmer sent the observatory detailed drawings of Jupiter and Mars that he’d made with a homemade telescope. Lowell astronomers were sufficiently impressed that they hired the young man, named Clyde Tombaugh, to help with an ambitious, but tedious, project.

The search for Planet X.
The observatory’s founder, Percival Lowell, had predicted that a massive ninth planet might be found beyond Neptune. Lowell had died in 1916, but his colleagues were eager to validate his Planet X theory. It might help counter the observatory’s association with Lowell’s more well-known legacy, his infamous and illusory Martian “canals,” and rescue the observatory from a second-class status.

Fortunately, Tombaugh proved to be more than simply a hired hand. On February 18, 1930, Tombaugh brought glory to Lowell Observatory by discovering the only major planet found this century.

It was named Pluto. (But Lowell was not vindicated: Pluto was much too small to be his predicted Planet X.)

Now, in the late 1950s, with Tombaugh no longer associated with the observatory and his planet search long over, Henry Giclas had conceived of a way to make additional use of Tombaugh’s labors.

He would take a series of long-exposure photographs of the sky, each on a glass plate corresponding with one taken by Tombaugh 30 years earlier. In that time, some of the stars would show movement. The closer ones would, anyway, just as when motorists see objects that are closer whiz by faster than distant ones.

Identifying that movement–called “proper motion”–was the best way to determine which stars were closest to the sun, valuable data for scientists who wanted to know what kind of stars a typical portion of the galaxy–namely our own–contains.

Soon after the project got under way, Giclas learned about the Prescott amateur who had discovered a comet, and decided to hire him.

But only, Giclas says, after Burnham’s mother apologized to the observatory for writing the unsigned article in the Courier.

“I couldn’t hold it against Burnham,” he says.

In 1959, with the continuation of his graduate studies in astronomy jeopardized by a lack of funds, Norm Thomas packed up his family of four and left Berkeley, California, for a job at Lowell Observatory.

There he was paired with Robert Burnham Jr., who for the past year had been working on the proper-motion survey with astronomers Giclas and Charles Slaughter.

Day after day, Thomas tried to trip up his taciturn and brilliant partner.
Sometimes he succeeded. Other times, Burnham came out on top.
Their competition would produce the most widely cited proper-motion survey in history.

Now that the project was running smoothly, Giclas and Slaughter turned it over to the two young men who lacked advance degrees in the field.

Both Burnham and Thomas were told not to expect the survey to last longer than three years.

Instead, it would last another 20.
Mostly, that was because of how well Burnham and Thomas worked together. Their success impressed the National Science Foundation, which continued to fund the project.

“Henry [Giclas] was quite good, but he was a little impatient with it,” Thomas says, adding that because Giclas wasn’t a “blinker” by nature, he wasn’t taking the project to its full potential.

To explain what he means, Thomas descends into the basement of one of Lowell Observatory’s oldest buildings where thousands of glass plates in white envelopes line the walls of a cramped room.

Against one wall is a contraption called a “blink comparator.” The machine held two glass plates at a time, one dating from the 1930s search for Planet X, the other exposed by Burnham or Thomas themselves. Corresponding postage-stamp-size regions from each plate were projected onto a screen, first from one plate and then the other, back and forth, clickety clack, endlessly.

With the plates lined up correctly, the stars in each portion projected on the screen would hold still. Even in the 30 years between exposures, most stars seemed fixed in their positions and showed no movement. But occasionally, in a particular field on the plates, Burnham or Thomas would notice a star make a subtle leap.

Thomas shows how he would mark the star with a dab of India ink, hoping that Burnham had missed it. After Burnham, using another, fresh plate, had made his own search, the two of them would compare notes, tallying up the moving stars, particularly the ones that the other had missed.

“That did provide something fun. Who would miss something really neat. It was a competition,” he says.

By the time the program ended in 1979, they would identify 9,000 high-motion stars as well as several comets, 1,500 asteroids and 2,000 new white-dwarf suspects–degenerate stars with incredible densities–as well as thousands of variable stars which they simply had no time to study.

Thomas describes it as a merry-go-round of activities. While one of them blinked during the day, the other would expose new plates at the 13-inch Pluto discovery telescope at night. Plates had to be developed, leaping stars identified and tabulated, and finder charts had to be made for the high-motion stars and white dwarfs so other astronomers could recover them in the sky. Both of them were also expected to help out by giving tours to visitors.

Somehow, the two of them found time in that demanding schedule to spend occasional nights simply touring the night sky with a telescope. Thomas says those nights are among his fondest memories.

“Bob was great to be with. I’d be the student. The stuff he had in his memory was just amazing.”

Like others, Thomas describes Burnham as exceedingly shy and reclusive. Only a few times, in their close 20-year collaboration, did Burnham make the trip down from Mars Hill to spend an evening at the Thomas home.

Burnham himself lived in a cabin on the observatory’s property. He’d moved into the rent-free home in lieu of a raise after his first year of work, and turned the place into a virtual museum.

Viola Courtney’s daughter Donna made frequent trips from Prescott and later Phoenix to visit her uncle. Often she would find him sitting in a rocking chair on pine needles outside his cabin, enjoying silence.

Inside, the cabin was a fascinating clutter. There were rocks that glowed under ultraviolet light. Ancient coins and other artifacts of long-dead cultures. Fossils of trilobites and sharks’ teeth. And on nearly every wall, from floor to ceiling, books.

Donna says she was careful to travel alone to see him. With people he knew well, Burnham relaxed and could be quite talkative. If Donna brought someone her uncle didn’t know, he’d clam up.

Once, she made a boyfriend wait in the car for a half-hour while she spent time with Burnham.

Burnham overcame his shyness sufficiently to have several girlfriends during his Lowell years. Viola Courtney and Thomas remember one woman in particular who seemed to bring Burnham nearly to the point of sociability.

“I remember that she was blond and curvaceous,” says Courtney. “She had visited the observatory on a trip. He would give talks to the tourists, and she was impressed by him. She was so taken, he arranged for her to have a summer job.”

Thomas remembers that Burnham was similarly taken, and that one time the shy astronomer gushed: “We’re really together on our philosophy.” Burnham was so far gone, Thomas says, he didn’t mind being seen holding hands with the girl.

The curvaceous blond herself, now Professor Julie Lutz of Washington State University, says she had just graduated from San Diego State University and spent the summer of 1965 at Lowell Observatory as a 20-year-old intern before beginning graduate work at the University of Illinois.

“Bob was very, very, very shy. But he was fascinating. His place was filled with fascinating stuff,” she remembers. “He was a pleasant person, but, you know, he didn’t talk to too many people at Lowell.

“He was like Tutankhamen’s tomb. Once you got to know him, you opened a passageway and then a lot of treasures would appear.”

She laughs when she’s told of Burnham’s comment about his philosophical girlfriend.

“I am a big reader of books. At that time, I think I’d read a lot of philosophy and history. I was probably pretty intellectual for my age. He was probably impressed that he could talk to me.”

She lived in a cabin near Burnham’s, and remembers walking hand in hand through the woods with the astronomer.

“Yeah, and that was about it,” she says with a chuckle.
Their fling ended with the summer.
But by that year, 1965, Burnham’s true love–the Celestial Survey he’d started 10 years earlier–was finally near completion.

Donna Courtney remembers walking around and around a long table at Lowell Observatory which was covered with papers.

The year was 1966. She was only 6 years old, but like the rest of the family, as well as Norm Thomas and his children, she had been enlisted by her uncle to circle the table with pages in her hands.

Collating hundreds of copies of the first of what would be an eight-volume, 2,000-page book seemed like an eternal task, and sticks in the memory of everyone who helped.

Burnham had decided to publish his Celestial Handbook himself.
He would write later that the idea of self-publication had come to him gradually, particularly after he began working at Lowell Observatory.

His employment there gave him access to the mountains of information in Lowell’s library, as well as the images on the thousands of glass plates he worked with every day.

His survey quickly became more than simply the observational notes of an amateur astronomer. Burnham could now include more scientific depth and thousands of intriguing photographs. He also injected material related to his other interests, including photographs of ancient coins that carried astronomical themes, discourses on the lore of constellations, even thousand-year-old Chinese poetry about the sky.

He knew it was becoming a remarkable work.
He’d made inquiries to publishers, Thomas says, but he was most often met with an, “Are you kidding?”

“I tried a few of the larger astronomical publishers,” Burnham wrote later. “Some thought that there really wasn’t much of a demand for anything like that. Others said that there was no way to finance such a thing. One publisher said that they would have to hire someone full-time for a couple of years just to check and edit the material. That would be a requirement, they said, if they were to publish. At a cost which would make the project impossible, of course.”

Thomas says Burnham was also disappointed by Lowell Observatory’s official position regarding the Handbook.

Namely, that there would be no position.
“I think Bob was counting on some promotional help from Lowell on the books, but it never happened,” Thomas says. The other astronomers, Thomas says, were concerned about the effect it might have on the observatory’s reputation if the books were full of errors.

“I knew him a lot better. I knew how careful he was. Other people didn’t know that,” Thomas says.

Other Lowell astronomers were also apparently unaware that Burnham had sought outside assistance to check the accuracy of his data.

Giclas, however, saw the books as an irritation.
“The great problem I had with him was his handbooks. I offered to have the observatory personnel here check what he put into them, but he was reluctant and would not do that. And for that reason I told him he could not make it a Lowell Observatory publication,” Giclas says.

“We had a great English amateur that published books and stuff, but the stuff he had in it was wrong. His name was Patrick Moore. In later years, he learned enough to at least try to put the facts down straight. But Burnham quoted Moore as many times as he quoted Henry Norris Russell or some other famous astronomer, you know. And that was the trouble; Burnham didn’t know the difference between someone who knew something and someone who didn’t.”

After Burnham finished collating the loose-leaf, typescripted books, Giclas says he gave them a cursory look. “I pointed out several errors in them. He may have changed some. I don’t know whether he did or not.”

Thomas says Burnham resented his colleagues’ reaction. “They were afraid that it would be full of errors, and then it turned out to be better than 80 percent of the stuff [published about astronomy] that comes out. The good reviews quieted some people down. That, and the fact that it became quite famous because of the lack of errors.”

No review carried more weight than that in the June 1966 issue of Sky & Telescope, the field’s primary popular journal. The reviewer, Robert Neil Stewart, found himself referring to a recent French book with a narrower scope as the only thing he could compare to the Celestial Handbook. While somewhat guarded in his praise (he only had the first, 218-page volume), Stewart did seem impressed by the sheer size of the projected work: “Mr. Burnham’s manual promises to be about 10 times more inclusive than its strongest competitor.”

And it was in English, to boot. “The greatest merit of the Celestial Handbook is its up-to-date and detailed physical information. . . . I know of no other place where all this information can be so readily obtained.” Yet, as Stewart and later reviewers noted, the Handbook was much more than an assemblage of data. He complimented Burnham for his frequent essays and other written interludes.

Thirteen years later, the same magazine would review the books again, and this time the writer’s tone would be less restrained.

Burnham’s Celestial Handbook had become a classic.

By 1976, Burnham had secured a deal with Dover Publications, Inc., in New York to republish the Handbook in three paperback volumes. Two years later, the books appeared.

As Sky & Telescope’s second reviewer, Kenneth Hewitt-White, noted in 1979, wherever people dedicated to exploring the night sky gathered, they would solve riddles about what they saw with a simple question: “What does Burnham say about it?”

Owners of small telescopes found it difficult to go where Burnham had not gone before.

The Handbook could guide the enthusiast from his or her backyard to the far reaches of the galaxy, explaining such concepts as stellar evolution en route.

The Handbook looked different from other books, with its many hand-drawn diagrams and the typescript pages preserved from the self-published edition.

It also contained passages that were pleasantly out of place in a book of science, such as the following statement in a section on cosmology, which tries to explain what our universe is doing here:

“Oriental philosophers speak of the ‘Tao,’ the all-pervading intelligence of the Universe, never personified or regarded as a ‘being’ of any sort; such a concept seems vastly more appropriate to the Universe we actually live in than do the grossly anthropomorphic and marvelously tortuous theologies of Western thinkers.”

Burnham knew that such passages would draw scorn from astronomers who held more mechanistic views. He would write later that he expected to come in for criticism for including them. But he was determined, he wrote, to make the books more than a dry list of data.

Courtney, who is now executor of her brother’s estate, says that the 1966, loose-leaf Handbook edition had eventually paid for itself, but Burnham was happy to be done with publishing the thing on his own.

Burnham wrote in 1982, “The memory of those days still causes me to leap forth from my pillow with a loud cry. I have this nightmare, you see, where I’m trying to publish the Britannica from my kitchen table. . . .”

But even as he began to enjoy the benefits of wider publication–and regular royalty checks–Burnham learned that Lowell Observatory planned to fire him.

Norm Thomas says that by 1979, one of the proper-motion survey’s goals had been met: After photographing small patches of the sky year after year, they had eventually worked their way to the north celestial pole, near the star Polaris.

There was still some sky near the southern horizon that they hadn’t gotten to yet, Thomas says, but the National Science Foundation refused to fund the project for an additional three years.

Burnham and Thomas had blinked their last plate.
By that time, Thomas had completed a master’s degree in geology at Northern Arizona University, and it wasn’t difficult for the observatory to find other work for him studying asteroids. But Burnham, despite his almost 22 years of service, wasn’t so easy to reassign.

“The only thing the observatory could offer him would be, well, a janitor’s job or something where he was supervised. And he didn’t want that kind of a job, so that was that. That’s all that was left that he was capable of doing,” says Henry Giclas.

Norm Thomas’ son Bruce, who was in high school at the time and had become close to Burnham, says that Burnham’s decaying relationship with Giclas also played a part in that decision.

“There was a building resistance between Burnham and Lowell [Observatory], partly because they felt he was using their resources for his Handbook. As it became more popular and people talked about it, Henry Giclas got more standoffish about it. There was a big lack of communication about the use of Lowell’s resources. Perhaps if Bob had been a better communicator he could have convinced the observatory that it was a positive thing for it.

“As the years went on, he was fighting with Lowell. He wanted to add to the public tour. He wanted a sound system and a choreographed slide show. He wanted a gift shop. But Giclas and others felt that it was a research institute that didn’t need to give tours.”

Thomas says Burnham wanted to take on more of those responsibilities, and hoped that he could make it a full-time job.

“Burnham brought his own stereo system. He brought blinds for the rotunda so a slide show could be put on, all on his own time and money. He felt, as the years went on, that Lowell didn’t care about that. Yet, ironically, 10 years after he had left, they adopted all those ideas.”

In April 1979, Burnham received official notice that his employment would end. The observatory gave him plenty of time to prepare: His job would not end until December of that year, and Lowell offered help finding him further employment.

Norm Thomas was exasperated by Burnham’s refusal to prepare for his termination.

“For years I’d kind of dogged him about investing in some land, some cheap land around here. And he never would do it. . . .”

“In 1979, when he knew he was going to lose his job, I told him, ‘You should start moving into something right now that would get you independent of rent.’ I recommended a mobile home.”

Thomas says Burnham did nothing, and in December 1979, he packed up his collections and books, rented a large apartment in Flagstaff, and severed his association with Lowell. Rent payments would soon stretch his resources despite the royalty checks he was receiving from Dover.

Giclas says that inability to plan characterized Burnham. “He was just that kind of a character. He didn’t seem to worry about anything. I don’t know what you can attribute it to.

“Burnham did a very good job when he was told exactly what to do and what to look for. That was great. When that ended, we just didn’t have any place for him. Which is sad.”

Only later would his colleagues and kin learn what a lifeline the observatory had been for him. Once it was cut, Robert Burnham Jr. would never be the same.

I’m sitting here as I have on countless nights before, using as a reference work your Celestial Handbook, and reflecting as always upon what a marvelous book it is. I cannot begin to tell you how much pleasure these volumes have brought me, not to mention their great value as sources of information. I should like, as a token of my appreciation, to send you a copy of the new edition of my book Galaxies. . . . I hope you’ll enjoy the book at least a fraction as much as I have yours.

–letter from Timothy Ferris,
dated February 6, 1982

Timothy Ferris, author of the 1981 National Book Award-nominated Galaxies and the 1989 Pulitzer Prize-nominated Coming of Age in the Milky Way, says that he’s used Robert Burnham’s books for decades, but, when he’s asked about them, realizes that he’s never talked to anybody about them.

Like others, Ferris professes an admiration for Burnham’s writing while knowing little about the man himself. He did, however, correspond briefly with Burnham in 1982.

“I remember his being a rather disillusioned man, primarily over his publisher’s handling of the book,” Ferris says. The Berkeley journalism professor emeritus also remembers Burnham’s anger over his firing.

“Lowell Observatory was famously broke, and a lot of astronomers were supporting themselves with real estate speculation. I guess from his perspective he had worked mightily and had not been rewarded accordingly.

“I can certainly vouch for the book; it’s a terrific book. His historical focus ensures the longevity of it. He had the good taste and judgment that sets this type of work apart from others in its field. He had the good judgment, for example, not to focus on flash-in-the-pan research that would go out of date quickly,” Ferris says.

As the ’80s progressed, Burnham’s books continued to gain popularity as his own fortunes began a steady nose dive.

Bruce Thomas remembers that Burnham was initially optimistic when he left the observatory. He received royalty checks in the mid-four figures every six months, he had begun another writing project–a fantasy novel–which was taking on epic proportions, and he’d rededicated himself to painting and other interests he’d put off.

But that optimism, Thomas says, didn’t mask his bitterness at Lowell’s termination of him.

Burnham also complained about how Dover Publications marketed the Handbook. Its audience was a narrow one, Burnham knew, but he told Thomas that readers were willing to pay more than the $8.95-per-volume cover price. He also believed that Dover was unnecessarily holding up a Japanese translation of the book–he knew that Japan, with its large astronomical community, could be a ripe market.

But the hardest hit for Burnham to take was the deep discounting of the Handbook in 1981. As incentive to join, the Astronomy Book Club began offering the complete set for only $2.95. Burnham told his sister that his royalties that year dropped “like a paralyzed buzzard.”

Other complaints, Thomas says, were less rational. One of Burnham’s gripes against Dover was its lack of interest in his fantasy novel.

Burnham also admitted to Thomas that Dover had made numerous advances on his royalties to help him out when money was short.

Oddly, Dover Publications spokeswoman Rosa Lopez declined to speak about Burnham or the history of the Handbook, asking that New Times submit a list of written questions. A list was sent, but Dover did not respond.

Bruce Thomas says he became increasingly concerned about the aging astronomer. Years earlier, when Burnham still lived and worked at Lowell, Bruce Thomas and other children of Lowell astronomers had made Burnham’s museumlike cabin something of a clubhouse. Thomas credits Burnham and his words of advice for improving his performance in school and his later success as a mathematics teacher.

But after 1980, Thomas says, their relationship was reversed, and he found himself handing out the advice. Although only a recent high school graduate, Thomas tried to help Burnham with practical matters that seemed to mystify him.

“I talked to him about getting unemployment. But he never did it. That would mean going to an office and dealing with people, and he had problems with that.”

Burnham’s shyness had become a pathology.
“When you first met Robert, you met a wall,” says Viola Courtney’s friend Michael Bartlett, who met Burnham at this time. “He made a poor first impression. He was very shy; he wouldn’t meet your eye. But once you broke that shell, the dike broke and out would come pouring the universe. It was a damned shame that he was crippled . . . by this personality defect which encapsulated this amazing person.”

Burnham yearned for the recognition that his books increasingly generated, but he could not bring himself to seek out the people who could give it to him.

He couldn’t even face an interviewer.
In 1982, with the popularity of the Handbook probably at its height, a lengthy article about Burnham–the only substantial biographical piece about him–appeared in Astronomy magazine.

Burnham had interviewed himself for the article.
Arrogant, weird and fascinating, a much longer version of the “interview” resides among Burnham’s papers. In the 37-page, single-spaced essay, Burnham delves deeply into his philosophical and political thought. He rails equally against what he sees as the foolishness of Western religions as well as the foolishness of a mechanistic view of existence. He also condemns a society that could not see the shortsightedness of fouling the environment in the name of progress.

These beliefs–an Eastern approach to nature and a disdain for organized religion and materialism–were long-held and characteristic of Burnham. Newer was the sense of frustration that the Handbook, considering its scope and popularity, reaped so little compared to books on astrology and other nonsense that commanded million-dollar advances.

Such frustrations about money, Bruce Thomas says, would increasingly consume Burnham.

Viola Courtney says, “He probably would have had opportunities for public speaking, but didn’t pursue it. He had a delightful sense of humor.” Although Burnham could hardly converse with someone he didn’t know well, he had, in 20 years of giving tours at Lowell, developed the ability to speak comfortably before a crowd. Courtney says she wondered why her brother couldn’t have found work at a planetarium or some other science-related facility where he could share his immense knowledge. But Burnham would shrug when she suggested it.

Michael Bartlett: “Everyone could see Robert’s potential except for Robert.”
Bruce Thomas: “He was a very different Bob than the one I had first met. The one who had been optimistic about creativity and the world.”

Burnham became obsessed with money-making schemes. Courtney says her brother lost money in at least one pyramid scheme during the early 1980s. He also tried several times to sell items door to door using a unique marketing technique: an army of children. Buying jewelry cheaply from mail-order houses, Burnham would enlist Thomas and other teens to sell the items for him. “He probably thought that if he used kids, they could sell it, because he was no salesman,” Thomas says.

Burnham also began selling off the collections of coins, meteorites, jade and other items that he’d spent years collecting. “He was a connoisseur. These were all very high-quality things,” Thomas says. He remembers one object in particular, a silver Roman coin stamped with an owl. It was the pride of his collection, Thomas says, but Burnham parted with it for $800 to pay for rent.

“He was getting very stressed and upset. He started to grasp at straws–he’d talk about treasure hunting,” Thomas says. What began as a diversion during his years at Lowell–hunting for reputed treasure with a metal detector–turned into a fetish as Burnham’s bank account dwindled.

“In some of the final years that I knew him, he would say things like, ‘If I get evicted, I don’t know what I’m going to do. Become a bum, I guess, and lose all of this stuff.’

“For a year, I gave him 20 dollars a week to help him with groceries,” Thomas says, and he knew that two other sons of Lowell astronomers gave Burnham money as well.

In December 1983, Burnham spotted a reference to himself in an issue of Sky & Telescope. Columnist George Lovi wished that more authors would show the dedication and drive of Burnham and several others. Burnham had to respond; his letter appeared five months later.

“Lovi . . . lamented the fact that so few people display the dedication needed to accomplish such a large project. This is hardly surprising when the rewards offered by our society can be so small.

“I have devoted over two decades of my life to astronomy, and my Celestial Handbook has been called a modern classic. I am the discoverer of six comets, not to mention thousands of new proper-motion stars, which my colleagues and I found during a 21-year proper-motion survey at Lowell Observatory. As a result of all these accomplishments, my income has rarely risen much above the poverty level. . . .”

If Burnham, who kept so assiduously to himself, was unsure what impact his books had had on others, he could have had no doubt after the responses to his letter began to arrive.

Wrote one devotee: “I am an extremely grateful and dedicated admirer of your Celestial Handbook, and when I saw your address in Sky & Telescope, I felt compelled to write my appreciation. . . .”

And from other letters: “Could you be so kind as to send me your autograph, perhaps with a short message if you could spare a few moments. I would always proudly keep it with the Handbook. . . .”

“I would like to offer a very large and heartfelt thank you for this wonderful set of handbooks. My dog-eared set is always with me when observing. . . .”

“The text is beautifully written and is almost as enjoyable as actual observation. As a chemist, I can think of no comparable work done or possible in my field. . . .”

“Your Celestial Handbook is considered the Bible among all of my associates. . . . My set holds a revered place in my library. . . .”

“I am on my second set of these books–the first set wore out from heavy use. In my library of over 1,200 books, this set is my most prized possession. . . .”

One writer, Louis Lyell of Jackson, Mississippi, wrote Burnham about an observatory he had helped build at a private school, and about the school’s need for an astronomy teacher. The job seemed custom-made for Burnham, who enjoyed talking to young people about science more than anything else.

Lyell says he never got a reply.
Instead, Burnham sank further into bitterness and obsession about money.
Then, in July 1985, he vanished.

Viola Courtney can’t be certain what day her brother disappeared. At the end of August, Norm Thomas called to tell her that police were conducting an investigation and had searched Burnham’s apartment.

Courtney and her family traveled to Flagstaff that weekend. In her brother’s mailbox, she found a letter she had sent to him on July 17, and judging from the pile of newspapers on Burnham’s porch, that’s about the time that he abandoned the place.

Norm Thomas and Courtney say it looked like the apartment had been robbed, but selectively. Missing were many small items that seemed valuable–shiny artifacts and coins, mostly.

Otherwise, the apartment was filled with the things that had always been there, as if Burnham had left suddenly.

Burnham’s landlord threatened to have the contents of the apartment auctioned unless Courtney paid his back rent. She did. And the rest of the weekend, Courtney and her daughter Donna and Michael Bartlett moved the collections and books to a storage unit.

“Robert had sold things, but there was still a lot of stuff in the apartment. Books, books and more books,” Courtney says.

“Huge books,” says her daughter.
“And rocks. Buckets and buckets of rocks,” Bartlett adds.
Then, they set out to find Burnham in Mexican Pocket.

It was a place, Courtney knew, between Flagstaff and Oak Creek Canyon where her brother searched for treasure. Perhaps he had gone there and something had happened, she reasoned.

Courtney and Bartlett went there but found nothing.
Then, just as they were about to leave, Courtney spotted Burnham’s VW bus among the trees.

It was locked, and the metal detector was inside. There was no trace of Burnham.

Flagstaff police searched the area in vain. Burnham became another name on a nationwide missing-persons list.

And the people who knew Burnham began to get used to the idea that he might be dead.

Then, about 11 p.m. on September 9, seven weeks after Burnham had disappeared, a Newport Beach, California, police officer noticed a disheveled man walking aimlessly on the beach.

He asked the man’s name. “Robert Burnham,” the man answered.
Burnham was wearing a long-sleeve shirt and pants, but his feet were bare, and they were covered with second-degree burns from exposure to the sun. He was taken to the hospital for treatment, then released to a shelter.

“He had a beard, he seemed tired. His feet were horrible. But it was him. He acted like he always had,” says his niece, Donna Courtney. She lived in San Bernardino at the time, and she retrieved him from the shelter. Then her mother drove out to bring him home to Phoenix.

She installed him in her one-bedroom mobile home in north Phoenix and nursed him. It took several weeks for his feet to heal.

She asked him what had happened in the seven weeks he had been missing.
His answer was so strange, she recorded her remembrance of it so she wouldn’t forget it.

He had gone to Mexican Pocket to look for treasure, and he had fallen asleep, Courtney says as she narrates the tape.

“Then he woke up. And he thought it was very early in the morning, the time of day when vision is very poor. He looked toward the place where he had left the van, and he saw two life-sized elephants, and some figures of people moving around the elephants. Then the elephants faded and he saw a woman carrying a child. And that figure faded and then he saw a cat, and he said to himself, ‘At least I know that cat is real.’ But as the cat came toward him, it sort of shimmered and just dissolved. Then, he said, everything went crazy.”

Burnham told her a tale of fragments of visions: his hand magically going through the door of a car; traveling on a city street in another van; in a hotel room high in the sky with a big window without glass; a tremendously loud sound that forced him toward the open window; someone saying, “Let’s go to the beach.”

But the moment he heard himself say his name to the Newport Beach police officer, Burnham felt normal. From that point on, he could account for his whereabouts.

“He had no memory how he came to Newport Beach, no idea of reality during the prior [seven]-week period. All he remembered were the hallucinations,” Courtney says.

No one remembers Burnham, who was 54 at the time of his disappearance, using illicit drugs of any kind. Bruce Thomas says Burnham often spoke against their use.

Says Michael Bartlett: “The job at Lowell was virtually the only job he ever had in his life. It took care of all of the mundane things in his life. Throughout that period he didn’t have to worry about the things he needed, and he had meager needs. . . . But when that job ended, it cut the legs out from under him. Then suddenly he needed to fend for himself.

“If he had some kind of mental breakdown, this is what precipitated it.”
Whatever had caused Burnham to lose a grip on reality seemed to have passed.
But Courtney says Burnham admitted to her that he feared ending up in a mental institution. It was the reason he refused her suggestion to seek an examination.

She had other suggestions as well. While she had come to Burnham’s aid without question, as the days wore on, her living situation became intolerable. Sharing her trailer with her brother gave her no privacy, and Burnham never left the house. She suggested he get a job, and she made that request stronger after his semiannual October royalty check arrived.

It was for only $300. Burnham had taken so many advances in the past, there was hardly anything left of his pay.

Burnham did some telemarketing from the trailer, but he hung his hopes on a check he’d been waiting years for: royalties on the Japanese edition of his Handbook, which had finally been published.

Burnham told Courtney that he expected a lucrative check in April 1986.
She says he counted on more than $10,000, a bonanza, considering his current living situation. Courtney, desperate for some privacy, bought a townhouse with Bartlett. She told Burnham he could stay in the trailer rent-free indefinitely as long as he paid utilities. She hoped it would be an incentive for him to find a steady job.

Burnham became convinced that the Japanese edition would finally change his fortunes.

Then, the check arrived. It was for $500.
It devastated him, Courtney says.
Courtney tried again to wake her brother up to financial reality. “I told him, ‘You can’t live on the royalties from Dover. You can’t live on the royalties of the Japanese book. In your mail-order schemes, you lost more than you’ve made. You need employment, then you can get an apartment and bring your things down from Flagstaff.’”

She shrugs. “Those were my plans for him. But he didn’t seem to have any plans of his own.”

Bartlett says, “At this point, he didn’t seem to have any zest for life left.”

“Perhaps he left Phoenix because he was afraid I would keep pushing to get him some kind of counseling,” Courtney says, and she appears to battle feelings of guilt.

Every weekend, Courtney would visit Burnham at the mobile home. But early in June, Burnham left without warning.

She would learn that on May 30, 1986, Burnham had withdrawn the last $20 from his bank account. He left with the money, the clothes on his back, and his social security card.

When she noticed that Burnham’s royalty checks stopped coming to the trailer, she asked a Dover employee if it was forwarding his checks. Yes, she was told. But Burnham had requested that Dover not divulge the address.

She never saw him again.

The old man who sold paintings of cats in San Diego’s Balboa Park would line up early on weekend mornings so that he could get a one-day vendor’s license before they ran out.

Then he would arrange his paintings on a bench and sit down amid them. He wasn’t much of a salesman. He didn’t hawk his wares. He simply waited for someone to come by and look at them.

During the week, he would simply sit on the bench, alone. Or he would paint his cats.

Workers at the nearby Reuben H. Fleet Space Theater remember him. Dennis Mammana, the planetarium’s astronomer, remembers seeing the man sitting on the same bench, day after day.

When he’s asked if he knew the man was the author of Burnham’s Celestial Handbook, Mammana replies:

“He couldn’t have been. Robert Burnham, the man who wrote the Celestial Handbook, was an editor at Astronomy magazine at the time.”

When Mammana’s told that he has made the common mistake of confusing the two writers–that there were in fact two Robert Burnhams, and the author of the Handbook had ended up sitting on a park bench outside his planetarium–Mammana sounds dismayed.

“Somebody had told me that he claimed to be Robert Burnham. This is just incredible. I’m sure no one believed him. I mean, you don’t expect that someone in that condition would be capable of producing such a work. The book is on every astronomer’s shelf.

“What a resource he could have been.”

Dave Amero remembers that Robert Burnham was a very nice man who lived down the hall from him at the Golden West Hotel, a residence hotel in downtown San Diego which, judging by the people lounging in the lobby, is inhabited primarily by older men with little income.

Amero and Dick Frishkoren are behind the hotel’s counter in the center of a large lobby which hints at a grandiose past long gone.

Frishkoren is a snappy dresser, and it’s difficult to believe he’s ever actually stayed in the place. Amero, on the other hand, has dull eyes and a simple but straightforward way of speaking, and it doesn’t seem surprising that he’s lived in the hotel for 28 years.

Both men remember Burnham staying at the hotel several years, and the dates 1986 to 1993 sound right.

“He said he was an author and that he was working on a new book. He said something about painting, and he spent a lot of time just sitting in the lobby,” Amero says. The hotel lies about a mile from Balboa Park.

Frishkoren estimates that in those years, Burnham would have paid about $200 per month to stay in the hotel.

Amero also remembers that Burnham seemed ill.

In the fall of 1991, Bruce Thomas had relocated to San Diego. One day, he took a walk in Balboa Park with two friends and found himself amid the weekend vendors. There were performers of various types. Tarot readings could be had cheaply. And a man sitting on a bench was selling paintings of cats.

He seemed familiar, Thomas thought as he walked past him. The beard threw him off, but then it came to him: It was Robert Burnham.

Thomas turned back to him.
“Bob?”
Burnham kept staring at the ground. Then, without looking up, he said: “Yeah, it’s me. Hi, Bruce.”

Thomas sat down with Burnham and introduced his friends, telling them that this was the man he mentioned so often.

“It was awkward. My friends sidled away while I talked to Bob for 10 minutes or so. He seemed uncomfortable. He said that he’d been in San Diego on and off for many years, and had liked it and decided to move there. He said he was just taking it easy and was still getting checks from Dover.”

Thomas bought a painting for $5.
When Thomas asked Burnham where he was staying, Burnham said he was living somewhere downtown that didn’t have a phone. Then he changed the subject.

Twice more Thomas sought out Burnham, visiting him in the park for brief conversations. He purchased three more paintings.

Then, a few days after Christmas, Norm Thomas visited his son, and the two of them went to the park to reunite the two old Lowell astronomers.

“It was hard to tell how Bob reacted to that. He was friendly and talked with Dad amicably. I could tell that he was forcing himself to be upbeat,” Bruce Thomas says.

“They chatted for a little, mostly about astronomy. Bob asked about Lowell.”
Norm Thomas told Burnham that he planned to name an asteroid after him. But there was a problem. An asteroid already carried the name Burnham, named after a turn-of-the-century astronomer of no relation. But Thomas remembered that Burnham had told him that in Germany, his father’s parents had gone by the name Bernheim. So that’s the name Thomas planned to use, to honor his longtime co-worker.

“Bob seemed happy about that,” Bruce Thomas says.
The three of them had their picture taken.
Norm Thomas describes it as a pleasant visit and nothing more. But his son says the encounter affected his father deeply. “I think he was probably very upset, but he doesn’t like to talk about it.”

Bruce Thomas would make several more visits to the park looking for Burnham.
Each time, he looked in vain.

In the summer of 1995, Donna Courtney’s husband, David Bastuk, came home with an assignment from school. He was taking a night course to learn to be a private investigator, and he was assigned the task of finding a missing person.

So Courtney suggested that he find her uncle. She supplied him with what she knew about him.

A few days later, Bastuk told her that he had done a search on Burnham’s social security number, and, according to a computer database, Burnham was dead.

It would take Viola Courtney another nine months to learn that Burnham had died in San Diego’s Mercy Hospital. She was slowed by a misspelled death certificate; a clerk had typed “Burham.”

The certificate indicates that Burnham was suffering from a host of ailments, all probably related to the gradual deterioration of his heart. Dr. John Dodge, the physician listed on the certificate, agreed to discuss Burnham’s file, but then changed his mind.

There is no indication of how long Burnham had suffered before he entered the hospital on March 9, or what treatment he may have received before that time. Neither Dave Amero at Golden West Hotel nor Dennis Mammana at Reuben H. Fleet Space Theater remembers Burnham’s needing to be hospitalized.

The certificate’s error was preserved on a marble headstone placed on Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery’s columbarium, a wall covered with headstones in memory of servicemen and women who had been cremated.

Courtney requested a correction. Today, Burnham’s headstone reads correctly, but his name still appears as “Burham” in the cemetery’s index.

Above his name on the headstone is a cross, put there at the request of a San Diego County public administrator assigned to oversee Burnham’s cremation.

It seems inappropriate.
“No, I don’t think of the universe as some sort of ultimate monarchy being ruled by a cosmic king on a throne, handing out written directives to his subordinates like a commanding general,” Burnham wrote in 1982. “Is there any religion that invites doubt, skepticism, or a freely inquiring type of mind? The scientist is free to say to his colleagues: ‘Gentlemen, new findings have made it necessary to revise some of our ideas.’ Have you ever heard a minister make such an announcement to his flock?”

But Bruce Thomas cautions against making too much of the symbol on Burnham’s memorial. “I’m sure if you asked him, he would tell you he wouldn’t want any kind of headstone, that it was silly. And he probably wouldn’t care what you put on it.”

As she did while he was alive, Viola Courtney has seen to her brother’s needs. She is executor of his estate and has wrestled with Dover Publications. Only recently, she says, did the company pay for three years of royalties owed Burnham’s estate. She has waited more than a year for Dover to submit an accounting of the Handbook’s sales in the final eight years of Burnham’s life.

Going through her brother’s papers, she also found that he had never withdrawn money from a retirement plan.

“It appears that he had money he didn’t know he had,” Michael Bartlett says. “He needed to be taken care of. He was like a brain in a bottle.”

Thirty years after its first publication, the Handbook remains a popular work. But the ineluctable shift of the Earth’s axis in space has made the positional data in the book sorely out of date. Other material is well behind the latest scientific understanding.

A year ago, a talented astronomer who has worked both as an amateur and a professional began considering taking on the task of updating Burnham’s massive work.

His name is Brian Skiff, he works at Lowell Observatory, and he knows the night sky about as well as anyone in the world.

He says that before taking on the challenge of producing a new, improved Celestial Handbook, he decided he’d better take another look at the old one.

“I was amazed. I think it’s just fantastic,” he says.
It was also daunting. Skiff thought better of the idea, and has put the task aside, at least temporarily.

He has enough work to do investigating asteroids. And when he’s done with a night’s observing, he retires to his home: Burnham’s old cabin.

On a recent afternoon in Lowell’s library, he talks with Norm Thomas about the few times he met Burnham.

Thomas grins when Skiff says that the most important work ever done on the 13-inch Pluto telescope was the proper-motion survey.

“I like to hear that,” Thomas says.
Later, walking across the grounds of the century-old observatory, Thomas talks about the nights when a high-school-educated shipping clerk took him on journeys to distant celestial realms. And then, with characteristic restraint, he sums up his feelings about Robert Burnham Jr.

“He is an amazing person who I value my acquaintance with,” Thomas says.

The asteroid Bernheim is currently 260 million miles from Earth, moving slowly eastward in the constellation of Leo.

phoenixnewtimes.com | originally published: September 25, 1997

Addendum: (received 2003 December 12)

Shortly after my 1997 story on Burnham appeared in the Phoenix New Times, Viola Courtney and I found additional papers in her possession, including her brother’s correspondence with Dover. Burnham, it turns out, sold his Handbook to Dover for a flat fee of $2,500 (His editors were so thrilled with the third volume, which was not only the largest of the three but also largely made up of previously unpublished material, they ended up paying Burnham a $500 bonus when the project was finished, making his total for the book $3,000.) However, the contract contained a rider which stipulated that Burnham would receive 50 percent royalties — Dover gets the other half — if any other company decided to publish the Handbook. It’s no wonder he was desperate for the Japanese edition to come out. I also found letters he had written to publishers in Germany and the Netherlands, hoping that editions in German and Dutch might be produced. The replies he received must have disappointed him: he was told that German and Dutch amateur astronomers had no problem reading his English version.

It was only after the Astronomy Book Club decided to publish their own copies that the contract’s rider kicked in and Burnham began to receive any royalties at all. In light of this, Burnham’s subsequent complaints about the meager royalties he received from the ABC after they discounted his book seem less legitimate. If it weren’t for the ABC, he wouldn’t have received another penny beyond the original $3,000. (Well, except for the Japanese edition, which did bring some small royalties as well.)

Tony Ortega is now managing editor of the New Times newspaper in Kansas City, called The Pitch.

3D Space Tour screensavers
Animated 3D screensavers with cosmic scenes. Photo-realistic and scientifically correct graphics.AA+
C++ implementation for the algorithms as presented in the book ‘Astronomical Algorithms’ by Jean Meeus

ASTRONOM
Planetary information software

ATC Advancede Telescope Control
Telescope control and automated supernovae search

AVIS FITS Viewer
FITS image viewer

Aberrator
Star-testing software that can show all the common telescope defects (astigmatism, coma, pinch, tube-currents, etc.)

Adastra FREESTAR
Accessible free planetarium with multiple viewplanes, accurate reports, live orbital tracking, and astronomical dictionary

Alcyone Ephemeris
An astronomial ephemeris calculator covering the period 3000 BC to AD 3500 that calculates heliocentric, geocentric, and topocentric positions and much more

AstroSnap and AstroSnap Pro
AstroSnap (Freeware) and AstroSnap Pro (Shareware) are two astronomical imaging programs especially designed for webcams

AstroGrav
Allows you to study how astronomical objects move and interact under the force of gravity

AstroNotes
Minimalistic browser-based application for archiving and managing observing and imaging data

AstroCalculator
Optical and Imaging calculator. Use for all aspects of Astrophotography from imaging characteristics, resolution to exposure and more.

AstroPlanner
Observation planning and logging with telescope control

AstroMB
Manage astronomical images and catalogs, allow robotic observations, astrometry and photometry

Astromist
Palm OS astronomy tool which helps you to organize your observation session

AstroExcel
Free astronomy Excel spreadsheet calculations and graphs

Astrometrica
Software for doing astrometry of Minor Planets

Astronomer’s Digital Clock
Displays time, date, and Julian day

Astra Image
Image processing for astronomical images

AstroVizier
Provides a detailed physical ephemeris for the major bodies of the solar system. Surface maps are given for Mercury, Venus, Moon, Mars, Pluto and grid maps are provided for the gas giants and the sun.

Astronomy Calculator
Provides sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset and lunar phase information for any location on Earth

Astro Timer PPC
Pocket PC Software designed for recording the timings of lunar grazings, ocultations, transits, meteor showers and any other astronomical observation that needs a record of the date and time to the nearest 10th of a second.

AstroPlanner
Astronomical observation planning, logging and telescope control software

AstroCalc
Calculates the position of planets and give their appearance

AstroGemini Screen Savers
Astronomy screen savers

Astronomy Software by AeroSpaceGuide
Guide to the Best Astronomy and Space Software online

Astronomical Observation Log
Log down your observations and import a pic or sketch of the object your observing.

AstroStack
Free program that takes a series of video images and combines them into one

Astro
French astronomy program, especially for Dobson’s owners

Astroart
Image processing for astronomical images

AutomaDome
Dome control software

Bentec Services Limited
Free software for hyperaspherical optical design

Best Pair
Software for picking the two best stars for auto alignment with Meade & Celestron scopes

Binary Maker
Accurately calculates light and radial velocity curves for almost any type of binary, simultaneously displaying the theoretical and observed curves as well as a 3-D model of the orbiting stars

C88
An informational tool for amateur astronomers

CADET
Image processing program specific to astronomical images that supports FITS, Bitmap and JPEG formats

CCD Astrometry
Software for doing astrometry of Minor Planets

CCDOPS
SBIG CCD camera control software

CCDSoft
Combines both CCD camera control functions and astronomical image processing functions into a single package

CLEA
Windows Software Modern Laboratory Exercises in Astronomy

CNebulaX
Freeware. Deep sky astronomy software for star charts with 25 million stars and 1.25 million deep sky objects.

Cartes du ciel
Free sky atlas for windows that provides access to catalogs and photographs (Sky charts in english)

Celestial Maps
Sky atlas for windows and DOS

Celestia
A free real-time space simulation that lets you experience our universe in three dimensions

Charon
Minor planet astrometry software

Free PDF Star Charts Dan Bruton, SFA Observatory

Circe
Astrometrical software for minor planets and comets

Coeli – Stella 2000
Real-time Windows planetarium with logbook, telescope control, and 3 integrated encyclopedic reference works.

CoolSky
Sky simulator for amateur astronomers that uses OpenGL technology

Cute Little Astronomy Program (CLAP)
Astronomy program displays the sun moon and planets for any location in the Northern Hemisphere.

CyberSky
Colorful, easy-to-use planetarium program

Dan’s Astronomy Software
Jupiter, Saturn, and eclipsing binary star programsDarkAdapted
Modifies your screen gamma settings so that you may preserve your dark adaptation while using your computer

designerSKY
Planetarium like starchart

Deepsky
Observining and planning software for observers, telescope control, log book, control panels

Desktop Universe by Main-Sequence Software
The fusion of a full-color photographic star atlas with a desktop planetarium program

Deep Sky Database
Online resource for building customized observing lists

Deep-Sky Planner
Observation Planning & Logging Software for Astronomers

Desktop Lunar Calendar
Desktop Lunar Calendar is simple, fun and easy to use calendar. It is accurate anywhere in the world.

DeepSkyStacker
Freeware for astrophotographers that simplifies all the pre-processing steps of deep sky pictures and is specialized in dealing with RAW files from DSLRs. TIFF, JPEG, BMP and PNG files are also supported

DeskMoony
Calculates current moon phase and draws it nicely.

Deepsky Free
Deepsky Free is the free version of Deepsky Astronomy Software

Delphinus
Freeware designed to control Canon DSLR Cameras by Serial Port (RS-232)

Digital Universe
Advanced astronomical simulator

Dimension 4
Time synchronization utility

Drift Scan Imaging
Drift scan software for CCD cameras

EarthDesk
Real time rendered Earth desktop with sunight, moonlight and clouds

Earth Centered Universe Pro v4.0
Planetarium and telescope control program designed for the requirements of amateur astronomers and professionals alike

Eagle Lander 3D
Authentic simulation of the Apollo lunar landings and includes accurate renditions of scenery, flight dynamics and the lunar module

EasySky
Star charting (planetarium software), 3D solar system, and animations

Eclipsing Binary Simulator
Visualise the orbit and synthetic light curve of binary star systems

Eclipse Finder for S60 Devices
Tiny Astronomical application for MIDP 2.0 devices, can calculate the Detailed Information of any Solar and Lunar Eclipses Phenomenon with extreme accuracy

EfeCalc
Calculates the position, rise times, and set times of the Sun, Moon, Planets, Stars; Solar and Lunar Eclipses (with maps generation)

Encyclopedia Galactica
Planetarium software, explore the moon features, 3D solar system

Esquire Nautical Almanc
Fully operational almanac

Find Orb
Computes orbital elements from observations

FlashSkies
Online Flash Planetarium for every Browser

Four By Jove
Provides a very precise position for the four main moons of Jupiter within +/- 8 km. Jupiter events like transits, shadow transits, eclipses and occultations are shown in a graphical form. Mutual events such as occultations and umbral eclipses can be shown in graphical form as well.

Focus Corrector
ActiveX image processing software, sharpens images

GeoFusion Mars demo
The GeoPlayer Mars program allows you to explore the Red Planet from outer space to deep in Valles Marinaris. You can fly through valleys and over craters on desktop PCs and laptop computers with a graphics accelerator This is a free low resolution version of a the GeoFusion CD.

Gravity Simulator
Software generates orbits using an in build integrator

Gravitation3D
Uses OpenGL to simulate star fields, planet trails, sun lighting, gravity wells, and much more

GrandTour
Simulate space as seen from the Voyager and Giotto spacecraft

Guide
Star Charting software

Hallo Northern Sky
Planetarium program for Windows

HomePlanet
Astronomy, space, and satellite tracking package

Hr Trace
Free VBA programmed Excel spreadsheets devoted to open cluster study

Hypersky
Computerized star atlas linked to a set of reference works

IRAF
Data analysis

JupSat
Calculates and displays the positions of Jupiter’s four main (Galilean) moons

JupView PPC
The positions of Jupiter’s satellites, Great Red Spot and a map of Jupiter’s features

K3CCDTools
Includes video-capturing, autoguiding, frame aligning and stacking and simple post-processing

Leaving the Cradle
Interactive 3D simulation of Apollo circumlunar flight. Includes 350 MB of planetary textures.

Lunar Occultation Workbench
Computes predictions of occultations by the Moon of the planets and stars

Lunar Globe: the Virtual Museum of lunar vehicles
survey the lunar sphere, lunar formations and other objects without an astronomical telescope

Lunar Phase Pro
Moon observer’s toolkit. Contains lunar phenomena predition tools, interactive moon atlas, searchable database of over 9,000 features and many other tools.

LunarPhase
Graphically displays the current phase of the moon and much more

Lunar Co-longitude
Computes co-longitude for dates from 1989 to 2020

Lunar Map Pro
Produces high resolution lunar maps for use at the telescope

MODAS
Modern Optical Design and Analysis Software

MPL3D Solar System
Explore the solar sytem and thousands of real extrasolar objects in a 3D interactive simulation of the close universe.

MaxIm DL
Image processing software

Maxclock 3.1
High-precision clock, displays sidereal and solar times, equation of time, Julian dates, Delta-T, aequatorial and ecliptic coordinates of sun and moon

Mars MOLA Viewer
View the actual terrain of Mars, at any point on the surface, as a fly-through real-time 3D rendering

Mariner 10 Image Browser and Reconstructor
Software for Mariner 10 TV experiment allows image processing with noise filtering, despeckling, and reconstruction

Meade Astronomical Software
Telescope control software

Meteor Observation Log
Log is designed around a 3 hour observation session with the capablity to record up to 20 meteors an hour

MegaStar
Sky Atlas for Windows

MicroObservatory
An astronomical image processing program that works with FITS and GIF files

Minor Planet Observer
MPO Connection and Canopus

Mira
Image Processing Software

Moovastar
Proper motion simulation, simulates star positions in the future and past

Moon Map for Pocket PC
A vectorized moon map for the Pocket PC and Palm devices.

Moon Phase Icon
Shows the current moon phase in your system tray

Moon Phase Oracle – Solunar Prediction Software
Astronomy software for any location worldwide displays information for any time of day

MyStars!
Shareware for stargazers

Newt Telescopes
A newtonian telescope design program that ray traces the telescope checking for vignetting, optimizes diagonal size, calculates baffle size and position, and a lot more

NexStar Freeware
Freeware allowing PC control of all models of NexStar telescopes

Newton’s Aquarium
A solar system construction set

NightCal
Produces a single A4 sheet monthly calendar telling the user when it gets dark, when the Moon rises and sets and what the Moon should look like when it does make an appearance

Observation Manager
Free and open Java based observation logging tool that stores it’s data in a free and open XML format called COMAST

OpTiX
Comprehensive optical design software

Orbit Explorer
Physics educational software for high school and college students and teachers

Orbiter
Freeware space flight simulation and Solar System exploration program with accurate physics, 3D graphics, and a first-person astronaut’s perspective.

Orbitron
Satellite tracking software for visual observers and radio amateurs

PEAS – Periodic Error Analyzing Software
Program for evaluation and analysis of periodical errors in equatorial mount

PIXY system 2
Automated astronomical image examination system

PICTools
Convert PIC image files, coming from IRIS (free image processing software) in unsigned 16-bit per colour channel TIFF files

PLUCOR.EXE
A freely downloadable Ephemeris program which will print out positions of Sun,Moon and planets

PP3
Free tool for drawing celestial chars in resolution-independent format (PDF)

PRODOBS
Deepsky database written in javascript, allows sophisticated queries, contains sky atlas, finder charts and object-related links to NED, SIMBAD or WEBDA (in german!)

Perseus
A vector engine-based planetarium, with USNO2 support, real images ‘melt’ into the background, 3D graphics for solar system bodies

Peranso
Period analysis software for variable stars

PinPoint
100% automated astrometric image processing for FITS files from any camera

PixInsight
PixInsight is a modular, open-architecture, portable image processing platform available on Linux/UNIX and MS Windows

PlanetWatch
Multimedia guide to our solar system

Planetenprogramm
Planetarium software, solution to the three body problem, the representation of the star sky and the planets, 3D

Planetarium
Displays star charts and other astronomical data on Palmtops

Planet’s Visibility and Orbits
Free software along with data on planets, asteroids and stars

Planetarius
3D view of Major and minor planets, Asteroids, Comets, Full Sky Map, Local Sky Map, Ephemerides using VSOP87/ELP82 solutions

Polygon Worlds
Various free software that lets you explore Mars and watch galaxies collide

Power Age Sky Simulator
Planetarium program, a graphic interpretation of the sky

Pocket Stars PDA
A star chart, ephemeris, and Celestial Navigation calculator for the Pocket PC

Practices on Observational Astronomy
Educational software with exercises involving eclipses, saros cycles, and the sky

RSI New Moon
Easy-to-use educational software for middle school through college. 3D views of the Moon’s phases, the Solar System, and more.

RTGUI: Windows Real-Time Interactive Astronomy Software
Controls most ‘goto’ telescopes, rapidly locate planets, deep-sky objects, and bright stars from catalogs

RedShift
Planetarium program

Registax
Freeware tool for alignment, stacking and processing of BMP or AVI image sequences.

SEDS FTP Site
Collection of astronomical software

STSORBIT PLUS
Space Shuttle and Satellite Tracking Software (SOP*.*)

SUNDI
Designed to allow you to quickly and easy design and plan the most popular sundials

Satellite Tracker
Satellite Tracking Software for many types of telescopes including the full line of Celestron, Meade, Astro-Physics, etc

Scope Calculator
Scope Calculator calculates and compares the magnification, field of view, and exit pupil of up to 7 eyepieces when used with a specific telescope

Screen Saver
Earth, moon, and planet screen savers

SimSolar
Solar System Simulator with Moon Phase display & Galilean Moons of Jupiter Simulator

SkyChart
Planetarium program

SkyGlobe
Planetarium program

Sky Atlas
A program for anyone that wants to know how to identify constellations and other space objects: stars, galaxies, nebulas, planets

SkyMap
Planetarium software with telescope control features

SkyObserver
Planetarium program for windows

SkyORB VR
A real time visual space simulation with ephemeris

SkyTools
Planetarium program by Skyhound

Solar Scouts
Course based games designed for grade 6 to early college. Topics include the solar system, space and seasons among others.

Solar System – Earth 3D screensaver
A realistic screensaver showing a magnificent view of our planet as seen from space

Solex
Ephemerides, orbits & planetarium based on numerical integration

Solar Kingdom
A 3D Solar System Simulator and Encyclopedia

Space Weather Applications
Graphs of current space weather data, interactive map of the Sun

StarView
Astronomical database browser and research analysis tool

Stellar Magic
Freeware and shareware image processing software. Astronomical image processing tutorial.

StarMessage – Moon Phase and Night Sky screensaver
View the moon phases and write your name in the stars of the night sky

Stellaris
A shareware program for the amateur astronomer

Stellarium
Freeware that renders 3D photo-realistic skies in real time (or here http://www.stellarium.org/)

StarCalc
Professional astronomy planetarium & star mapping program for Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP with plugin support

Stella Theater
Japanese planetarium currently named Planetarium Pro

Star Atlas Pro
Deep Sky Star Charts and Telescope Control Software

StarLight Pro
StarLight Pro produces animated views of eclipsing binary stars and calculate synthetic lightcurves. The effects of limb darkening, temperature, inclination, stellar size, mass ratio, and star shape are included.Starry Night
Home of Starry Night and Deep Space Explorer

StellaNavigator
Astronomy Simulation Software

StarChartGL
OpenGL star chart with photo-realistic views of 110,000 stars, 110 messiers and all the planets

StarStrider
A software planetarium, a virtual space-ship, an three dimensional star chart, and more

StarTrak
Software and database to guide a Dobsonian telescope (or any telescope with altazimuth mount)

Sun and Moon Almanac
Graphical Sun and Moon Almanac

Swiss Ephemeris Info
High precision ephemeris

TPoint
Telescope pointing analysis software

TS-24
Crystal Lake Observatory astronomy learning and discovery program.

TachyonNET for PocketPC
A complete astronomical package for serious amateurs. It includes Meade Telescope Control.

Texas A&M Astronomical Software
Lots of Freeware by Don Carona involving the Jupiter system, the Sun, the Moon, etc.

TheSky Pocket Edition
Graphical astronomy program that turns your personal computer into a personal planetarium

The Free Virtual
Galaxy Project a free 3-D virtual space program based upon data obtained from NASA’s ADC

TheSky
Planetarium and telescope control program

Trefach Astronomy Centre Software
Network Telescope Control, Blink Comparator and slightly OT GPS Mapper

Tria Image Processing
Allows fast and effective Blind Deconvolution (de-blurring) of any image and opens 16 image types, including 32-bit TiFFs and FITS, and provides 16 additional image processing functions

Tria Image Processing
The Tria program enables fast and effective deconvolution and blind deconvolution, image math, and image registration. Version 2.0 provides faster processing, improved display, and unique image analysis tools.

Uniview
Uniview is a realtime 3D computer graphics platform for astronomy- and Earth-based sciences, used by leading planetariums like Hayden (New York) and Gates (Denver)

v-Clock
A Small tool to display current vedic date and time parameters along with panchanga details and planetary positions, developed using swiss ephemeris library.

VITO AstroNavigator
GPS application that displays sky map above you accordingly to your current position, time and direction of movement

VRMars-Spirit – The Red Planet Mars 3D
Virtual Reality Astronomy Software presenting the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit Mission, powered by the VRPresents technology. It gives the feel of being on the surface of Mars.

Venera 15/16 Radar Mosaic Browser
Windows software allows browsing of the Venera 15 and 16 radar maps.

Virtual Lunar Atlas
Moon image atlas for Windows

Visual Spec
Spectral image analysis software

Voyager 4
View the heavens on your computer from any place on Earth, in the Solar System, or beyond

Where is M13?
Displays the 3-D positions of deep sky objects within and around the Galaxy.

Winstars
Planetarium, showing you the appearance of the sky, as seen from anywhere on Earth, for any date

Xearth
provides an image of the Earth correctly shaded for the current position of the Sun

Xephem
Star-charting, sky-simulating, ephemeris-generating software

YoMama
Yale Observatory iMAge Manipulation Application

Zubot Suite
This is a group of programs which allow you to align, rotate, stack, and enhance astronomy pictures.

Macintosh Software

Astronomy Village
Investigating the UniverseAstroPlanner
Astronomical observation planning, logging and telescope control software

AstroImageBrowser
Front end to Digitized Sky Survey (DSS) internet repository of astronomical images

Astro IIDC
Astronomy and Microscopy oriented application developed from the ground up to make FireWire camera imaging easier on the Mac

Best Pair
Software for picking the two best stars for auto alignment with Meade & Celestron scopes

Binary Stars
Free astronomical software for Macintosh computers, complete with manuals, teaching binary star concepts, for classroom or personal use.

CLEA
Macintosh Software Modern Laboratory Exercises in Astronomy

Carina Software
Voyager II, SkyPilot, and SkyGazer

Celestia
A scientifically accurate 3D space simulation (uses OpenGL), contains 3D positions of everything from stars to asteroids and artifical satellites (also a large amount of expansion addons are available)

Digital Universe
Planetarium software

EquinoX
13 different filters for organizing deep sky objects and many controls to adjust the sky display, can run your astro-imaging webcam, has SBIG camera support, and will control your telescope with voice commands

INFO-MAC Science and Math
MoonClock, Moon Tool, NightSky, Planet, StarAtlas, MacAstro, MAIA, etc.

IRAF
Data analysis

Macintosh Scientific Software
Contains scientific software

MacAstronomica
Astronomy/astrology program for the Mac

MoonDock
Shows moon phase on desktop plus other info

RedShift
Planetarium program

SEDS FTP Site – Macintosh
Collection of astronomy software

Scope Calculator (Mac)
Scope Calculator calculates and compares the magnification, field of view, and exit pupil of up to 7 eyepieces when used with a specific telescope

SkyORB VR
A real time visual space simulation with ephemeris

Starry Night
Macintosh planetarium program

Sunlit Earth Widget
Displays the sunlit part of the Earth as will as the city lights from dark side

TheSky
Planetarium and telescope control program

Where is M13?
Displays the 3-D positions of deep sky objects within and around the Galaxy.

Xephem
Star-charting, sky-simulating, ephemeris-generating software

UNIX Software

Clear Sky Institute
Observatory control and astronomical analysis systemESO-MIDAS
European Southern Observatory Munich Image Data Analysis System VMS, OpenVMS and UNIX systems, including LINUX

fchart
Draws practical, well-readable deepsky finder charts in Postscript (EPS) and Adobe PDF format.

Fireball
Free windows software to calculate atmospheric trajectory and heliocentric orbit of meteoroids.

IRAF
Image Reduction and Analysis Facility

KStars
Planetarium software for the KDE desktop environment

Linux for Astronomy
Includes over 3Gb of Astronomical software precompiled for the Linux (x86) operating system

Nightfall Eclipsing Binary Star Program
Model for eclipsing binary stars, for Linux or any other Unix

Orbit Reconstruction, Simulation and Analysis (ORSA)
A framework for celestial mechanics investigations

QVarStar
QVarStar is a GCVS (General Catalogue of Variable Stars) catalog browser for Unix

Skymap
Planetarium program

Where is M13?
Displays the 3-D positions of deep sky objects within and around the Galaxy.

Xephem
Star-charting, sky-simulating, ephemeris-generating software

Xplns
Displays, calculates, tracks the position of many celestial objects (stars, galaxies, nebulae, constellations, planets, comets, etc.)

Java, JavaScript, and Active Server Pages

WebCCD
Produces an artificial image of a star field based on the selected catalog3D Solar System
Navigate through the Solar System, approach any planetary body, orbit it, control the flow of time, textured images

AcruSky Mobile
Free Java-planetarium for cell phones

Aladin
Sky atlas allowing the user to visualize digitized images of any part of the sky, to superimpose entries from astronomical catalogs or personal user data files, and to access related data and information from the SIMBAD, NED, VizieR, etc.

AstroViewer
The AstroViewer planetarium applet shows a sky map for any time and any location on Earth. Individual printable sky maps (GIF, PDF) can be created.

Astronomy Magazine – Star Dome
Sky mapping program to plan your observing sessions

DeepSkyLive
A free web-based star charting java-applet: draws stars to mag 11.5, can display all NGC objects

Ephemeris.com
Sun to Sedna Ephemeris

Galaxien-Photoscript
Javascript for galaxy observers in German

GeoAstro Applet Collection
Java applets concerning the positions of the Sun and Moon in the sky and much more

J-Track
Java applet that tracks Mir, Hubble, UARS and COBE.

JODAS
Java based Optical Design and Analysis Software

JSkyCalc
Expedites the ‘time-and-the-sky’ calculations needed by observational astronomers

Java Observing Tool
Earth, moon, sun, planets, and star chart Java tools

Jupiter Events
JavaScript Application

Julian Date
JavaScript Application

Mobile Planetarium for Java Phones
Open-source MIDP1.0/2.0 midlet for Java-enabled mobile/cell phones or handheld device that simulates the whole sky

Picosky
Sideral time calculator

picoSky
Cellular telephone planetarium

Skynotes
Jupiter’s moon positions and Moon Phases

Solar System Live
WWW Interactive

Solar System Simulator
Simulate the sky, planets, and satellites as seen from Earth. Acurate renderings and event predictions (transits, shadows, eclipse, ocultation) of any planet and satellite.

Space Weather Applications
Graphs of current space weather data from NOAA GOES satellites and other data sources

Sun and Moon Almanac
Interactive almanac

Sunlit Earth Java Desktop Application
Displays the sunlit part of the Earth as will as the city lights from dark side

Sun And Moon Times
Mobile phone software to calculate the rise and set times for the Sun and Moon and the Moon phase.

The Planets
Java Application to plot Jupiter’s Moons and Saturn’s Rings

Where is M13?
Displays the 3-D positions of deep sky objects within and around the Galaxy.

Your Sky
Interactive web-based planetarium

Astronomy Code

Amazon.com Astronomy Books
Astronomy With Your Personal Computer by Peter Duffett-Smith, Astronomical Formulae for Calculators by Jean H. Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms by Jean Meeus, Textbook on Spherical Astronomy by W. M. Smart, Robin Michael Green, Mathematical Astronomy Morsels by Jean Meeus, Fundamental Ephemeris Computations by Paul J. Heafner, Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac by P. Kenneth SeidelmannApproximate Astronomical Positions
Some code and explainations by Keith Burnett

Duffett-Schmitt: Astronomy With Your PC
Astronomy BASIC code, ICE, and other code

FAQ: Astronomy Calculations for the Amateur
Code examples

The Sky Online Astronomy Software
Lots of BASIC Code, search for the article ‘Basically Speaking’ as well

Willmann-Bell, Inc.
Publishers of of astronomy books on photometry, CCD’s, and catalogs

Online Data Sources

Astronomical Data Center – Goddard
Data resourceStar, Asteroid and NGC Catalogs
Star, Asteroid and NGC Catalogs

Telescopic Companion Books
Data resource

The Space FAQ
The Space FAQ

Other Astronomy Software

AIPS
Astronomical Image Processing SystemAstronomy Software (in french and english)
Astronomy Software

AstroWeb – Astronomy Software Servers
Astronomy Software

AstroTips.com
All about Astronomy Software

David Eagle’s Celestial and Orbital Mechanics Web
Links to MATLAB files and PC programs

SEDS FTP Site
SEDS FTP Site

STSci Free Space Science Software
Astronomy Software

Software for Eclipsing Binary Stars
Astronomy Software

TachyonNET for PocketPC
A complete astronomical package for serious amateurs. It includes Meade Telescope Control among dozens of other functions.

Yahoo! Astronomy Software
Astronomy Software

What’s New
These latest additions also appear above.

Planetarius
3D view of Major and minor planets, Asteroids, Comets, Full Sky Map, Local Sky Map, Ephemerides using VSOP87/ELP82 solutionsCute Little Astronomy Program (CLAP)
Astronomy program displays the sun moon and planets for any location in the Northern Hemisphere.

v-Clock
A Small tool to display current vedic date and time parameters along with panchanga details and planetary positions, developed using swiss ephemeris library.

Zubot Suite
This is a group of programs which allow you to align, rotate, stack, and enhance astronomy pictures.

AcruSky Mobile
Free Java-planetarium for cell phones

Eclipse Finder for S60 Devices
Tiny Astronomical application for MIDP 2.0 devices, can calculate the Detailed Information of any Solar and Lunar Eclipses Phenomenon with extreme accuracy

Four By Jove
Provides a very precise position for the four main moons of Jupiter within +/- 8 km. Jupiter events like transits, shadow transits, eclipses and occultations are shown in a graphical form. Mutual events such as occultations and umbral eclipses can be shown in graphical form as well.

Gravity Simulator
Software generates orbits using an in build integrator

MPL3D Solar System
Explore the solar sytem and thousands of real extrasolar objects in a 3D interactive simulation of the close universe.

Observation Manager
Free and open Java based observation logging tool that stores it’s data in a free and open XML format called COMAST

PICTools
Convert PIC image files, coming from IRIS (free image processing software) in unsigned 16-bit per colour channel TIFF files

PixInsight
PixInsight is a modular, open-architecture, portable image processing platform available on Linux/UNIX and MS Windows

Planetenprogramm
Planetarium software, solution to the three body problem, the representation of the star sky and the planets, 3D

AstroPlanner
Observation planning and logging with telescope control

Solar System – Earth 3D screensaver
A realistic screensaver showing a magnificent view of our planet as seen from space

Tria Image Processing
The Tria program enables fast and effective deconvolution and blind deconvolution, image math, and image registration. Version 2.0 provides faster processing, improved display, and unique image analysis tools.

Uniview
Uniview is a realtime 3D computer graphics platform for astronomy- and Earth-based sciences, used by leading planetariums like Hayden (New York) and Gates (Denver)

AstroVizier
Provides a detailed physical ephemeris for the major bodies of the solar system. Surface maps are given for Mercury, Venus, Moon, Mars, Pluto and grid maps are provided for the gas giants and the sun.

VRMars-Spirit – The Red Planet Mars 3D
Virtual Reality Astronomy Software presenting the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit Mission, powered by the VRPresents technology. It gives the feel of being on the surface of Mars.

Voyager 4
View the heavens on your computer from any place on Earth, in the Solar System, or beyond