Skip to main content
SearchLoginLogin or Signup

Glen William Deen (1935–2014)

Published onDec 01, 2018
Glen William Deen (1935–2014)

Glen William Deen, a founding member of the Lone Star Observatory, a privately held astronomy facility in Oklahoma, died on 15 October 2014, following a heart attack. Deen was born on 31 May 1935 in Dallas, Texas, to Lucile Davis and William H. Deen. As a youth, he displayed a passion for science and technology, experimenting with a chemistry set and home steam engine. At age 16, he received his ham radio license. Deen graduated from Crozier Technical High School, in Dallas, then entered Arlington State College and Southern Methodist University, before completing his BS in Electrical Engineering in 1960 at the University of Texas at Austin.

Deen worked as an electrical engineer at the Collins Radio Company, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, from 1960 to 1965, then moved to Collins’s Richardson, Texas, division with his wife Evelyn Brockmeyer Deen and their son Robert. In 1969, he founded the TaxLogic company, which processed federal income tax returns on a mainframe computer for accounting firms. When the business failed after a year, Deen took up a job as an electrical engineer at Electrospace Systems, remaining with the company until 1975. In the meantime, he restarted TaxLogic, this time achieving success. TaxLogic was named to the Inc Magazine 500 list of the country's fastest growing private companies.

In 1981, Deen bought a Celestron 8-inch telescope and joined the Texas Astronomical Society, pursuing an interest in astronomy that lasted the rest of his life. In 1987, he became a founding member of Oklahoma’s Lone Star Observatory. He also created and sold MicroSky, a microfiche reproduction of the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, which was used by amateur astronomers. From 1990 to 1991, Deen worked as a computer-programmer research assistant for Brian Tinsley at the University of Texas at Dallas, and co-authored a paper with Tinsley on a possible relationship between cosmic ray flux and high-level clouds via electrofreezing of supercooled water. The paper appeared in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Glen Deen spent much of his retirement years pursuing his passions for astronomy, classical music, and piloting airplanes, as well as researching topics in religion, philosophy, and alternative physics.

Additional links:

Comments
0
comment
No comments here