Life and career
As a boy in Montigny-le-Roi, Flammarion saw two solar eclipses. By eleven he was keeping astronomical and weather observations of his own. In Paris he worked as an apprentice engraver and studied mathematics in the evenings. A manuscript he had written about the universe came to the attention of Urbain Le Verrier, director of the Paris Observatory. In 1858 the observatory gave him a post calculating the movements of celestial bodies.
Flammarion wanted to ask a question that his tables of figures could scarcely answer. Could there be life on the worlds whose orbits he calculated? His first published book, La Pluralité des mondes habités (1862), brought that question to the public. He also took instruments up in balloons to study the atmosphere. At his own observatory in Juvisy he studied Mars, and in 1887 he helped found the Société astronomique de France.
Work and ideas
Astronomie populaire, published in 1880, grew out of his conviction that the sky belonged to everyone who could look up. His journal L’Astronomie gave observers another way to share what they saw. His long study of Mars brought together records stretching back to the seventeenth century.
Fiction let him change the observer’s position altogether. In Lumen, a conversation turns the travel time of light into a story about memory: far enough from Earth, an observer could receive light that had left it long ago. Urania also moves between earthly observation and imagined worlds. Its English edition credits Augusta Rice Stetson as translator.
