O. Richard Norton

O. Richard

NORTON

1937 - 2009

Former Director of the Fleischmann Planetarium at the University of Nevada, O. Richard Norton passed away on May 17, 2009 in Bend, Oregon, after a long illness.

He is survived by his wife, Dorothy; his sister, Gloria Berg; three children from previous marriages; a granddaughter along with two nieces and a nephew.

He worked at Fleischmann from 1963 to 1973 and was actively involved in developing the first 180 degree fisheye motion picture projector called the Atmospherium, which was used to project realistic time lapse motion pictures of developing weather systems onto the planetarium dome. His first book The Planetarium and Atmospherium, an Indoor Universe was published in 1969. In 1973, he became Director of the Flandrau Planetarium at the University of Arizona in Tucson. There he continued working on planetarium design and served as a consultant to Minolta Corporation in Japan.

In 1986 he moved to Bend, where he taught at Central Oregon Community College. He had a passion for all things astronomical and for public education, and taught community education classes and led field trips to view solar eclipses from Mexico to Romania. In 1994 he published his first popular book on meteorites Rocks From Space, followed by The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Meteorites in 2002 and The Field Guide to Meteors and Meteorites in 2008.