Karl Gordon Henize

Karl Gordon Henize (/ˈhɛnaɪz/; October 17, 1926 – October 5, 1993) was an American astronomer, space scientist, NASA astronaut, and professor at Northwestern University. He was stationed at several observatories around the world, including McCormick Observatory, Lamont–Hussey Observatory (South Africa), Mount Wilson Observatory, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Mount Stromlo Observatory (Australia). He was a member of the astronaut support crew for Apollo 15 and Skylab 2, 3, and 4. As a mission specialist on the Spacelab-2 mission (STS-51-F), he flew on Space Shuttle Challenger in July/August 1985. He was awarded the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal in 1974.

He died in 1993, during a Mount Everest expedition while testing equipment for NASA.

Karl Henize was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on October 17, 1926. He grew up on a small dairy farm outside Cincinnati, and his boyhood heroes were Buck Rogers and Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Henize was fascinated with space at a young age. Since space travel had not happened yet during his childhood, he became interested in astronomy. Henize built his own telescopes and read every book on astronomy in his school's library. He joined the Boy Scouts, and his only merit badge was in astronomy.

His hobbies included home computers, stamp collecting, mathematics, and astronomy, and he also enjoyed racquetball, baseball, skin diving, and mountain climbing.

Henize attended elementary school in Plainville and Mariemont, Ohio. The school was small, three or four rooms, and did not contain a library. He also attended high school in Mariemont, where he played baseball and was on the tumbling team. Due to the war, Karl elected to not finish high school, instead entering the V-12 Navy College Training Program, which first took him to Denison University in Granville, Ohio, and then to the University of Virginia. World War II ended before he received his Naval Commission, so he became a member of the U.S. Naval Reserve, reaching the rank of lieutenant commander and retained a draft status of A1 until being required to give that up when he became an astronaut in 1967. While at the University of Virginia, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics in 1947, and a Master of Arts degree in astronomy in 1948, while also carrying out research at McCormick Observatory. He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy in astronomy in 1954 by the University of Michigan.

Henize married Caroline née Weber in Ann Arbor, and they had four children: Kurt, Marcia, Skye, and Vance.

Henize was an observer for the University of Michigan Observatory from 1948 to 1951, stationed at the Lamont–Hussey Observatory in Bloemfontein, Union of South Africa. While there, he conducted an objective-prism spectroscopic survey of the southern sky for stars and nebulae showing emission lines of hydrogen.

In 1954 he became a Carnegie post-doctoral fellow at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California, and conducted spectroscopic and photometric studies of emission-line stars and nebulae. From 1956 to 1959, he served as a senior astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. He was in charge of photographic satellite tracking stations for the satellite tracking program and responsible for the establishment and operation of a global network of 12 stations for photographic tracking of artificial Earth satellites.