I’ll be sharing the history of the magazine from time to time, a little at a time, in this blog. It’s a fascinating story that has witnessed astronomy grow in leaps and bounds as our understanding of the cosmos has deepened. And you can capture the whole history of the magazine on DVD for your computer — every page of every issue, 449 issues and more than 46,000 pages altogether.
Credit:
Kalmbach Publishing Co.
The DVD also includes the entire histories of
Deep Sky and
Telescope Making magazines, two quarterlies published by
Astronomy, 23 special issues published over the past 15 years, and other special features. It comprises a gold mine for anyone interested in astronomy. Check it out
here.
As background, here’s the story of the magazine’s first year:
By mid-1973, the Steve and David Walther were ready to launch their new enterprise in earnest. The first issue of
Astronomy, cover date August 1973, was published on a web press in Pewaukee, Wisconsin, on July 17, 1973. The issue featured a multiwavelength image of the Sun on the cover, 48 pages total, and contained five feature articles and plentiful information about what to see in the sky that month. Contributors included Jay M. Pasachoff, who wrote the cover story about solar eclipses, William Bruce Weaver on the search for “Planet X,” R. Newton Mayall on variable stars, and John Sanford on photographing the heavens. An observational highlight amid the sky coverage focused on hunting Comet Kohoutek, which was then approaching, and which turned out to be a monumental disappointment, much fainter than many of the predictions had called for. The first issue had a circulation of about 18,000.
In this original incarnation, the staff consisted of Steve Walther as the publisher and editor, Penny Oldenburger in the role of managing editor, Craig McFarland Brown as the art director, and a number of outside contributors. The magazine’s first office was located in a small suite at 757 North Broadway Street in downtown Milwaukee. The tiny staff would grow and change as response to the magazine exceeded even what Walther had dreamed of.
Early issues of the magazine continued in a similar vein, growing to 64 pages by year’s end and featuring such topics as the martian surface (prior to the Viking landers!), a story on the moons of Mars by Carl Sagan, thoughts on whether galaxies or quasars came first, the distance scale of the cosmos, an interview with astronomer Frank Drake, and inside the Orion Nebula. Among the magazine’s original departments were the Sky Almanac (the equivalent of today’s “The Sky this Month”), the central StarDome sky map, and Astro-News.
Prominent advertisers of the day included Celestron, Cave Optical Co., Meade Instruments, Roger W. Tuthill, and Criterion Manufacturing Co.
More to come next week!