The Popularization of Astronomy in Early Twentieth-Century Sweden

In the winter of 1922 the Swedish astronomer and director of the Uppsala observatory, Östen Bergstrand (1873–1948), wrote a despairing letter to his former student and now junior colleague, Knut Lundmark (1889–1958). Bergstrand was struggling with a lengthy manuscript for a major popular astronomy handbook, and in the letter he complains about his toils. The work is difficult and time-consuming, and the publisher’s deadline has long since passed. Cautiously he asks for Lundmark’s assistance on one of the more specialized chapters. Lundmark had recently defended his thesis on the extragalactic distance to the Andromeda nebulae. ² His work won international recognition and he was to become one of the major advocates of the view that the spiral nebulae were situated far outside the Milky Way and were distant star systems in their own right. ³ At the time of Bergstrand’s letter he was working on a scholarship at the famous Greenwich Observatory in London, England.