On February 6, 1923, American astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard lay dying in the upstairs bedroom of his house on the shore of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, not far from the two telescopes he loved most — the 25cm (10-inch) Bruce astrograph he used extensively to photograph the Milky Way and the Yerkes 1m (40-inch) refractor, the world’s largest instrument of its kind.
Few astronomers have achieved Barnard’s distinguished record. His name is forever tied to the eponymous Barnard’s Star in Ophiuchus and the nebulous Barnard’s Loop in Orion. He’s also famously known for his catalogue of 369 dark nebulae — some of which are among the most photogenic objects in the night sky. Perhaps Barnard’s greatest achievement, however, was his magnificent and monumental photographic tour de force, A Photographic Atlas of Selected Regions of the Milky Way.
A life under the stars
Barnard’s was a storybook life in which he rose through sheer courage, determination, and genius from a ragged, urchinly existence in Nashville, Tennessee, during the Civil War, to become the virtual custodian of what he called the Milky Way’s “glittering star fields”. His life was an astronomical odyssey and, in the end, he could say with Odysseus himself, “My fame has gone abroad to the sky’s rim.”
By 1923, Barnard’s health had been
