I can't say that I knew Beniamin Egishevich Markarian very close – he was much older than me and I have seen him very rare, although I always watched his published papers with interest. First I met him being a student of the Moscow University during my summer astronomical practice in 1961 in the Byurakan Observatory. Markarian was my supervisor, and he gave me the first lessons of practical astrophysics (my task was to take photos of a spiral galaxy and to carry out data processing in order to obtain B-V color distribution all over its surface; it is worth reminding that there were no computers yet, so it was a very painstaking job).
Since that time I met him only two or three times during my rare visits to Byurakan. Every time it was a pleasure to chat with him: he was a wise and considerate interlocutor. But in those student days he was just a teacher for me who knows a lot. I remember that it was easy to contact with him, he really was a good pedagogue. He seemed to me an even-minded, probably a little closed person, although his self-sufficiency never passed to arrogance. Much later I recognized how it was difficult to keep independent way of thinking even in science.
Speaking about the research work of Dr. Markarian, I have no doubt that he is one of the few persons who provided a fame of the Byurakan Observatory as one of the leading astronomical centers in the world. The Byurakan Sky Survey carried out by Markarian and his pupils using wide field Schmidt telescope is certainly not the only but probably the most significant of his large-scale scientific achievements. He developed a new very effective way of searching of active extragalactic objects, but this is not just a realization of a successful idea, it is a titanic manual job, a tremendous volume of which is even hard to imagine, and also an inexplicable paradoxical intuition of a researcher behind it.
Markarian galaxies deservedly bear his name. But the bright marks left by Markarian in stellar and extragalactic astronomy is not the main point of this short reminiscence. The most essential thing I would like to stress is that there is a shortage of such people as Beniamin Markarian at any time. Nowadays especially…
Prof. Anatoly V. ZASOV
Sternberg Astronomical Institute (SAI) and Moscow State University, Russia