Camille Flammarion

Camille Flammarion (February 26, 1842 – June 3, 1925) was a French astronomer. His full name is sometimes (rarely) given as Nicolas Camille Flammarion.

He was a prolific author of more than fifty titles, including popular science works about astronomy. He also published the magazine L'Astronomie. He maintained a private observatory at Juvisy-sur-Orge, France.

He was a founder and the first president of the Société Astronomique de France.

He was the first to suggest the names Triton and Amalthea for moons of Neptune and Jupiter, respectively, although these names were not officially adopted until many decades later.

His second wife was Gabrielle Renaudot Flammarion. Despite his scientific background, or perhaps even because of it, he had an interest in spiritualism and reincarnation. This influenced some of his science fiction. Other than that his writing about other worlds adhered fairly closely to then current ideas in evolutionary theory and astronomy.

The enigmatic "Flammarion Woodcut" first appeared in an 1888 Flammarion publication.

Bibliography

• The famous "Flat Earth" woodcut originates with Flammarion's 1888 L'Atmosphere: Météorologie Populaire (p. 163)
  
• La pluralité es mondes habité (The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds), 1862.
  
• Real and Imaginary Worlds, 1864.
  
• Lumen, 1867.
  
• Recits de l'infini, 1872.
  
• L'Atmosphere: Météorologie Populaire, 1888.
  
• Astronomie populaire, 1880. His best-selling work, it was translated into English as Popular Astronomy in 1894.
  
• La planè Mars et ses conditions d'habitabilité, 1892.
  
• La Fin du Monde (The End of the World), 1893, is a science fiction novel about a comet colliding with the Earth.
  
• Death and Its Mystery, 1921, 3 volumes.
  

Honors

Named after him

• Flammarion crater on the Moon.
  
• Flammarion crater on Mars.
  

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Biographies of Physicists and Astronomers