Sky & Telescope January 1998 [antikvár]

Spectrum"Things Fail Apart"bi'fiiiThat's the title of the first novel by my favorite African writer, Chinua Acliebe. Okonkwo, a tribal headman, is disinherited by whites and commits suicide. It's a simple plot.I couldn't help but reflect on this novel as 1 read a recent story by Tony Ortega in Phoenix's New Times. Titled "Sky Writer," it profiles the most shadowy, yet famous, amateur to grace 20th-century astronomy: Robert Burnham Jr. of Celestial Handbook fame. Except for his name, Burnham never existed in mainstream astronomy amateur or professional. (Even his name is often conftised with that of another astronomy writer.) The Burnham painted by Ortega was a loner, one who felt abused by "the system," couldn't orchestrate his personal life, and never learned self-promotion.Burnham grew up in Prescott, Arizona, graduated from high school, joined the Air Force, and returned home with no clear life mission. Then in 1957 he discovered a comet (the first of six in three years), and that led to his hiring by Lowell Observatory's Henry Giclas to map the motions of stars across the sky. This association gave Burnham access to technical literature and Lowell's photographic plate collection, resources he needed to complete his handbook.In the mid-'60s Burnham self-published his 2,138-page opus, and a decade later he got Dover Publications to reprint it. Yet the Celestial Handbook turned out to be a mixed blessing. On the upside, for many years Dover paid him thousands of dollars annually, before the royalties dried up due to a book-club deal. On the downside, the book caused friction at Lowell and estrangement from Giclas. After more than 20 years on the job Burnham was laid off when the proper-motion survey ended.Increasingly concerned about money, Burnham apparently suffered a mental breakdown in 1985. Eventually he ended up in San Diego. Ortega leaves me with the haunting image of a derelict seemingly sentient but shattered in spirit reduced to selling his paintings of cats in Balboa Park. Burnham died on March 9, 1993, at age 62, and no one but the coroner noticed.By every standard Robert Burnham could have become a superstar on the astronomy scene. 1 can easily imagine him as an amalgam of Walter Scott Houston, E. C. Krupp, and David Levy. Yet Burnham seems to have committed mental suicide destroyed by the need for public recognition and his inability to make it happen. Whether because of his personality, pubhc indifference, or just bad luck, somehow he managed to fall through all of our community's cracks.Burnham's story is tragic but not unique. If you read Ortega's frill text (http://www.phoenbmewtimes.com/1996/092597/featurel-l.html), there's at least one other person tucked in there who suffered a similar fate.