Axel Firsoff

Valdemar Axel Firsoff was known principally as an amateur astronomer. He was born in 1912 of Swedish descent, and died on 19 November 1981. He lived in Lochearnhead, Scotland, before moving to Somerset, England, where he settled in Glastonbury.

Biography

Axel Firsoff held an MA degree in languages and worked as a Swedish translator and in the United Kingdom Patent Office. He was a keen mountaineer and skier, as some of his earlier books reveal, and he was a ski instructor for the British Olympic Ski Team in the 1950s. He developed an interest in science, in particular geology and astronomy and this led him to publish numerous books on the moon and inner planets.

Many of his books also touched on extraterrestrial life and the nature of the mind. In Life, Mind and Galaxies, he speculated that "mind seems to be an entity of the same order as energy and matter", an idea well before its time. In other aspects of his work, such as the nature of the lunar craters, which he considered to be of volcanic rather than cosmological origin, he was later proved to be well wide of the mark.

Honors

Firsoff crater, located in Meridiani Planum on the planet Mars, is named in Firsoff's honor. Firsoff Crater is located at 2.63° North, 350.58° East.[1]

Selected bibliography

Sources

  1. ↑ http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/Feature/14782;jsessionid=1f811d2cab6d10c252033eaeedf3
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