Who Was Carl Sagan?
The famed scientist, and celebrity, had a lot more going on than just hosting a television series.
It was almost like a dispatch from another planet: the invitation to the young astronomer to leave Brooklyn and visit the lakes and gorges of upstate New York.
"A letter shows up in my mailbox from Carl Sagan," said Neil deGrasse Tyson, recalling the 1975 invitation at a recent Library of Congress event celebrating Sagan. "I couldn't believe it. Famous people don't write out of the blue to strangers."
But the invitation was real. In response to his Cornell application, Tyson met the famous professor on a college visit soon after. Sagan offered to let the 17-year-old astronomer camp out at his house if a snowstorm knocked out his bus ride home.
Tyson eventually ended up at Harvard instead of Cornell,
