I recently read about the death of Robert Burnham Jnr
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/issue...5/feature.html
Maybe some of you missed hearing this too. His 3 volumes are great.
Here is part of the report.
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.
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/tpls/_Common/Art/hr.gif
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.