Karl G. Henize

Karl Henize, the man who took the beautiful photograph of the Large Magellanic Cloud, was a NASA astronaut. Henize received his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 1954. In 1967 he left a full professorship at Northwestern University to join the Apollo astronaut corps. He served on the support crew for Apollo 15 and would have flown on either Apollo 20, 21 or 22, had funding continued for the program. An objective prism UV spectrograph of his was used on the Skylab space station in the early 1970s. In 1985 he finally got his chance to go into space as a mission specialist on the SpaceLab2 experiment aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger.

Henize had a lifelong interest in the LMC and left behind a catalog of objects in it bearing his name. His greatest passion however was for exploring. In 1994, when nearly 70 years old, he succumbed to hypoxia on a climb of Mount Everest and was buried on the mountain at 22,000 ft.

Biographical data kindly provided by Chris Anderson. Page maintained by Steven Gibson.