“At the time it was kind of New Age-y, but now it is mainstream stuff,” Percy says. In the early 1970s Garrison helped develop and teach an interdisciplinary course called Life on Other Worlds, which examined whether life was possible somewhere else in the universe. He enthusiastically taught the popular introductory Astro 101 course for non-science students, where he left them “with a good lasting impression of astronomy and astronomers,” says his long-time departmental colleague John Percy. Garrison was intent on spreading the joys of astronomy to undergraduates and non-scientists. He did a postdoctoral fellowship with the Carnegie Institution in California, working at the historic Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories, before bringing his young family across the continent by car in 1968 to settle in at the University of Toronto, where he would stay for four decades. That’s where he whetted his interest in astronomy, following up with a degree in physics at the University of Wisconsin, then a PhD in astronomy at the University of Chicago. At West Aurora High School he met the woman who would become his first wife, Ada Mighell.Īfter serving in the United States Marine Corps for two years in the mid-1950s, he followed Ada to Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., where he earned his first degree, a bachelor's in math. He was born on May 9, 1936, in Aurora, Ill, a western suburb of Chicago. He leaves his partner Susanna Jacob, children Forest Lee, Alexandra and David Charles, and three grandchildren. Overall, Shelton says, “he made astronomy accessible to the masses without dumbing it down. If it was happening on our side of the sun, it would be beautiful, but it's not.” It's happening on the other side of the sun. “The presence of Jupiter doesn't mean a hill of beans. 'The alignment is a non-event,” he told the Globe and Mail. Doomsayers were predicting disaster as Mercury, Venus, Mars and Saturn lined up with the sun, moon and the Earth. In 2000, he helped debunk the theory that a cataclysm was pending on May 5. Garrison was comfortable talking to the media about anything to do with astronomy. “Bob was soft-spoken but a very good spokesman… and was the perfect liaison for U of T,” Shelton says. He arranged public events and answered endless questions from the press. Garrison had a key role as media gatekeeper after Shelton’s discovery of Supernova 1987A generated huge interest worldwide. Among his breakthroughs was the discovery of a pure helium star, and he was the supervisor of astronomer Ian Shelton, who in 1987 detected the brightest supernova observed from Earth in several centuries. His focus was on star classification and spectral analysis, the study of the radiation given off by stars and what characteristics can be gleaned from that data.

Garrison, who died in August of this year, was a long-time professor in the University of Toronto's department of astronomy and astrophysics. His infectious enthusiasm for the stars was transmitted not just to undergraduates and graduate students, but to the community at large. Robert (Bob) Frederick Garrison was a gifted astronomer who was also a masterful spokesman for his discipline, opening up the splendours of the heavens to non-scientists in Canada and abroad.

Robert garrison