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Leif Erland Andersson

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Nationality
  
Swedish

Role
  
Astronomer

Name
  
Leif Andersson


Spouse(s)
  
Gloria Ptacek

Occupation
  
Astronomer

Died
  
1979, Vinberg, Sweden

Leif Erland Andersson httpsuploadwikimediaorgwikipediacommonsthu

Alma mater
  
Lund University, Indiana University Bloomington

Education
  
Indiana University Bloomington

Leif Erland Andersson (4 November 1943 – 4 May 1979) was a Swedish astronomer.

Leif Erland Andersson Leif Erland Andersson Wikipedia

Andersson had been a child prodigy who won the Swedish television quiz show 10.000-kronorsfrågan ("The 10,000 Kronor Question") twice, the first time at age 16.

From his late teen years, he was also a well-known science fiction fan in Sweden, who chaired the MalCon in 1966 in Malmö and took over editing the pioneering Swedish science fiction amateur journal, the Scandinavian Amateur Press Alliance (SAPA) after John-Henry Holmberg left the position some time after 1964.

Andersson studied astronomy at Lund University, but received a scholarship to San Michele Observatory in on the island of Anacapri in Sicily in 1968.

He studied the work of Professor Åke Wallenquist, at Uppsala University. Andersson later went to Indiana University Bloomington to complete his Ph.D. degree. While there, he married Gloria Ptacek in 1973 at the Beck Chapel of Indiana University.

Andersson was hired in a post-doctoral research associate position in the summer of 1973 by Dr. Gerard Kuiper at the Lunar & Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. Andersson calculated the first observable transits of Pluto and Charon in the early 1980s, but did not live to see them.

He mapped the far side of the moon in NASA's Catalogue of Lunar Nomenclature, with co-author Ewen Whitaker, published in 1982.

After his death from lymphatic cancer at the age of 35 in 1979, the crater Andersson on the Moon was named after him. He was survived by his wife.

In honor of Leif Andersson's work on the determination of Pluto's pole position, the Spacewatch Asteroid Project at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory named an asteroid in his honor in the Minor Planet Circular of 18 December 1995, p. 827:

References

Leif Erland Andersson Wikipedia