Camille Flammarion

Camille Flammarion (1842–1925) was a French astronomer and the most widely read popularizer of science of his time. He entered the Paris Observatory at sixteen, founded the Société astronomique de France in 1887 and built his own observatory at Juvisy, where he studied Mars and double stars. His Popular Astronomy of 1880 sold in hundreds of thousands of copies, and he followed it with dozens of books on the planets, the atmosphere, the end of the world and the possibility of life on other worlds, as well as fiction. He was also a committed spiritualist who investigated mediums and wrote on death and the survival of the soul.