Emery, an astrophysicist whose broad interests featured a fondness for the 12-string guitar and MacGyver, the TV character who solved crime problems with offbeat, ingenious methods, died Jan. 26, 2022, at his home in Albuquerque, N.M.

Emery was born June 29, 1933, in Summit, N.J. He attended Princeton for two years; enlisted in the Army, where he spent three years; then enrolled at Rutgers and graduated in 1960. He then returned to Princeton, earning a Ph.D. in 1963.

The next year Emery taught physics at Yale and Wesleyan. He also played 12-string guitar in New York City coffeehouses. In 1968 he began teaching at the University of Nevada in Reno, then moved to Putney, Vt. 

In 1975 he met Susan Hopley in Putney. They were married in 1976 and moved to La Serena, Chile, where Emery joined the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, living first down below and then up in the Andes.

In 1977 Emery joined Itek Corp. in Lexington, Mass., and bought a historic house in Ipswich. It turned out that an ancestor of Emery’s had built the house in 1680. In 1985 Emery left Itek to work full time with Susan in their specialty antiques business. In 1993 they moved to Santa Fe, N.M., and ran a gallery, then to a new home on land leased to them by the Cochiti Pueblo. Their last stop, from 2018 to 2022 was in an apartment in Albuquerque. 

Susan, his wife of 45 years, is his only survivor.