Richard A. Proctor

Richard Anthony Proctor (1837–1888) was an English astronomer and the most popular writer on astronomy of the Victorian age. Educated at Cambridge, he lost his fortune in a bank failure in 1866 and supported himself by writing, producing more than fifty books and hundreds of articles. His map of Mars of 1867 named its features after astronomers, he was the first to suggest that lunar craters were formed by meteor impacts, and his Other Worlds Than Ours (1870) argued for life on other planets. He founded the magazine Knowledge in 1881, and settled in the United States, where he died of yellow fever in New York.