Sky Writer

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.