#lady sciencers

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I took the astronomy course that was offered at Barnard, the last year I was there, and that was with Professor Jacoby. That was also the last year he was teaching. And I don’t think that would have inspired me to go into astronomy. He was sort of tired of teaching these young women. I felt as if all his jokes had been told 10 or 15 times already. Things like that.

Henrietta Swope on her undergrad astronomy professor, Harold Jacoby

I have most of a Great Lady Astronomers of History post written on Henrietta Swope, but it really ought to come after a post on Henrietta Swan Leavitt, so have this quote from her oral history instead. There are a lot of gems in there; she was quite sassy. The takeaway from this one? Good teachers matter!

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One of these days I’ll do a write-up for Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, but in the meantime, you should watch this great video that gives a good overview of one of the many reasons she’s AMAZING.

H/T to Summer!

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Great Lady Astronomers of History -- Caroline Herschel

Did you see this Google Doodle last week? Another lady astronomer!  This time it was Caroline Herschel. (The scientific liberties taken with the design didn’t bother me as much as they did Phil Plait, but they’re worth reading about. TMYK! Also, as with the other “big name” women, I will only touch on a few things about her life.) Born in March 1750 in Hanover, Germany, Caroline had a difficult childhood, catching a number of diseases, including Typhus, which stunted her growth at 4’3’’. Caroline’s mother did not believe that young women should be educated in the same fashion as men, but her father snuck math lessons in when her mother was away.

(William and Caroline at work in 1896. Image source.)

In 1772, Caroline moved to Bath, England, to join her brother William and manage his household; he was at the time a bachelor and apparently unable--or simply not expected--to do so himself. (That house is now a museum, if you’re ever in the area.) Both Caroline and William initially worked as musicians and music teachers, and when William took up astronomy as a hobby, Caroline joined him. After William discovered the planet Uranus in 1781, he was offered a job as the King’s Astronomer and the Herschels moved to Berkshire, just outside of London. Caroline was paid £50 per year (the equivalent of £5,700 per year in 2016) for her work as William’s assistant, making her the first recorded woman to be paid to do science. (Thankfully, salaries have gone up since then!)

(Left: Image of the Andromeda Galaxy with its companion dwarf galaxy M110 marked. Image source. Right: Image of Comet Kohoutek, not discovered by Caroline Herschel, but still pretty cool. Image source.)

After they moved, Caroline began making observations of her own in addition to helping William. She independently discovered M110, a dwarf elliptical galaxy that is in orbit around the Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest galactic neighbor. On the 1st of August 1786, sweeping the sky on her own while William was out of town, Caroline discovered her first of eight comets, Comet C/1786 P1 (Herschel). She went on to discover seven more by 1797. Additionally, Caroline (in conjunction with William) worked on the Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars, which updated, corrected, and indexed John Flamsteed’s catalog of his own observations, as well as adding ~1500 more stars to the catalog. Later, William’s son John (and therefore Caroline’s nephew) spearheaded a new version of the catalog that added ~2500 stars, doubling the overall size of the catalog.

(Left: C. Herschel lunar crater. Image source. Right: 3D model of Asteroid Lucretia. Image source.)

Following her brother William’s death in 1822, Caroline returned to Hanover to stay with family. While there, she continued to do astronomy, working closely with John, compiling a list of nebulae for him, and keeping his notes and records organized. In recognition of her work, in 1828, Caroline was presented with a Gold Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society. (The next woman to win an RAS Gold Medal was Vera Rubin in 1996.) In addition to most of her comet discoveries being named after her, Caroline has a crater on the moon that bears her name, C. Herschel, as well as an asteroid, 281 Lucretia. She was admitted to the Royal Society in 1835, at the same time as Mary Somerville; together they were the first women to be admitted.

(A portrait of Caroline Herschel in 1829. Image source.)

We talk a lot about what it’s like to be a woman (or other underrepresented minority) in astronomy today, and it’s fascinating to see how women in the past navigated the sexism and cultural norms that were much more restrictive than what we see today. A huge amount of the Herschels’ correspondence is still available today, and we see how Caroline couched her discoveries in language that made it clear she understood her place in society. The paper about her first comet is technically a letter to a colleague of her brother’s who was the secretary of the Royal Society. Entitled “An Account of a New Comet. In a Letter from Miss Caroline Herschel to Charles Blagden, M. D. Sec. R. S.”, it starts with “In consequence of the Friendship which I know to exist between you and my Brother I venture to trouble you in his absence with the following imperfect account of a comet.” and ends with “You will do me the favour of communicating these observations to my brother’s astronomical friends.” In between, however, Caroline shows a mastery of the required code switching, describing her observations and instrument set-up in detail to demonstrate that although her account may be “imperfect” it is definitely not incorrect. A later paper, after she had established herself as a capable observer, starts with “Last night I discovered a comet…” Much more succinct! For more on this aspect of her life and work, this article is a great examination.

(William and John walk and talk about astronomy in a Cosmos episode. Caroline is noticeably absent. Image source.)

Interestingly--although perhaps unsurprisingly--even recent the literature about Caroline is rampant with sexism. In a book published in 2009, one of the entries in the index for her is “crankiness developed by”. It directs the reader to a paragraph that starts off with the sentence “In general, however, Caroline became increasingly cranky.” Really? Maybe just say that she was in her mid-80s and grieving the death of her brother, who she had lived and worked with for most of her life, and cut her some slack when the rooms she was living in started to deteriorate and her brother Dietrich’s widow was scheming to get money from her? In a book published in 2014, the section that describes how Caroline moved into lodgings of her own in 1797, choosing to no longer live with William and his wife Mary, is entitled “A Family Spat” and it is implied that Caroline got upset and moved out after getting offended by a comment made by William or Mary. Certainly it’s possible that this happened (although there is no evidence cited) but also isn’t it possible that Caroline just wanted to live on her own for once? I love my brother and his wife, and have a wonderful time visiting them, but I would definitely not want to live with them! And of course, in the Cosmos reboot episode A Sky Full of Ghosts, although William and John were discussed extensively, not a single half-sentence mention was made of Caroline.

Despite all of this, she was still a pretty amazing person, and I was very glad to see that celebrated last week!

Other sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Herschel http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/03/15/who-is-caroline-herschel-the-cinderella-tale-of-a-pioneering-fem/http://www.sheisanastronomer.org/index.php/history/carolineherschel

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Great Lady Astronomers of History -- Maria Mitchell

Last week, I mentioned that Dorrit Hoffleit spent the second half of her career splitting her time between school years at Yale and summers at the Maria Mitchell Observatory on Nantucket. So just who is this Maria Mitchell and what did she do to get an observatory (and an entire association) named after her?

(And a Google Doodle, which is basically my main goal in life. Image source.)

Maria (pronounced "mə-RYE-ə", like Mariah Carey) was born on 1 August 1818 on the island of Nantucket to Quaker parents. In keeping with the traditions of the Quaker community, Maria was given the same educational opportunities as the boys in her family. She was interested in astronomy from an early age and spent many nights observing the skies using her family’s brass 2.75-inch refractor telescope.

(Portrait of Maria Mitchell painted by Herminia B . Dassel, circa 1851, in honor/celebration of her comet discovery. Image source.)

On 1 October 1847 Maria was observing on her own while her parents were elsewhere in the house hosting a dinner party. That night, she discovered a comet while sweeping the skies with her telescope, becoming the first person in the world to discover a “telescopic” comet, one that was visible only through a telescope and not with the naked eye. (It was, additionally, the first comet ever discovered from the U.S., and the third discovered by a woman, after Caroline Herschel and Maria Winkelmann Kirch.) This discovery brought Maria worldwide attention, including a gold medal prize from the King of Denmark. (Click here to read the story of how the prize was almost mistakenly given to Italian astronomer Francesco de Vico because of bad weather in Nantucket.)

(Left: Maria’s quarters & observatory at Vassar. Right: Maria’s first class of astronomy students at Vassar. Image source for both images.)

In 1865, Maria Mitchell was appointed Professor of Astronomy at the newly-opened Vassar College, the first person asked to be on the faculty as well as the only woman on the faculty for awhile. She was simultaneously appointed the Director of the Vassar Observatory, which had a 12” Alvan Clark refracting telescope at the time. In 1871, Maria learned that her junior male colleagues were paid more than she and fellow woman professor Dr. Alida Avery were paid. Although the school’s administration tried to attribute the differential to “Lady privileges”, aka room and board, the difference was much greater than reasonable room and board costs would be. Maria and Alida threatened to quit if they were not fairly compensated, and in 1872 their salaries were appropriately adjusted. Maria taught at Vassar until 1888, when she retired due to poor health, about a year before she died on 28 June 1889.

Perhaps because she was the first American woman astronomer, quite a few books aimed at younger readers have been written about Maria. In rough order of reading level, from easier to more difficult, the four I’ve been able to get my hands on are Maria Mitchell: Stargazer, Maria Mitchell, Girl Astronomer, America’s First Woman Astronomer, and Maria Mitchell: The Soul of An Astronomer. I’d say they range from early elementary (or what you could read to a preschooler in small chunks) to early high school. There is a lot of story-telling in these, especially the earlier ones, that is probably close enough to being true in spirit if not raw facts, but I must admit that the only one I’ve read all the way through is Maria Mitchell: Stargazer, which is cute, though it does get the date of the 1831 eclipse wrong by a week. There is another book called Maria’s Comet that I haven’t read, but there are freely-available educational activities for it here. (I have a hold on it at my library--if it’s good, I’ll let y’all know!)

Two non-fiction books about her aimed at the adult reader are Sweeper in the Sky and Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics, the second of which has been highly recommended to me by a number of people, but I haven’t had a chance to sit down and read it yet. An historical fiction novel based loosely on Maria’s life exists, but, sadly, I was not a huge fan of it and don’t particularly recommend it. There is also of course Maria’s own writing, collected in Maria Mitchell: A Life in Journals and Letters, which is available for free in Kindle format and which is full of many of her great quotes.

(Left: The SS John W. Brown, a Liberty Ship of identical design to the SS Maria Mitchell. Image source. Right: A model of the Maria Mitchell Comet, a train car used by the Metro North Railroad. Image source.)

In addition to having an entire association created to preserve her legacy, Maria had a lunar crater and an asteroid (1455 Mitchella) named after her (both of which seem almost prosaic at this point, ha...trust me, they’re not!), as well as a WWII Liberty Ship and a Metro North train car. You can even see a short video of the train in 2011 if you click here; it’s almost certainly still in service today. Pretty amazing!

Sources http://www.mariamitchell.org/about/about-maria-mitchell (and other pages therein) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Mitchell http://www.sheisanastronomer.org/index.php/history/maria-mitchell https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/08/01/maria-mitchell-diaries/ http://vcencyclopedia.vassar.edu/faculty/original-faculty/maria-mitchell/maria-mitchell-salary-dispute.html http://www.rasc.ca/asteroids/asteroid-1455-mitchella

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Great Lady Astronomers of History -- Dorrit Hoffleit

We’re really starting to get into The Greats here, women who were not only clever and dedicated workers, but who lived and worked recently enough that we have extensive knowledge about their lives as well as copies of their writing, for both professional and popular audiences.

(Image source)

It’s hard to write (just) a blog post about Dorrit Hoffleit, who was born in March 1907 in Alabama and died in April 2007 in Connecticut, when there are multiple books written about both her and her science, including two sets of conference proceedings from meetings held to celebrate her 90th and 100th birthdays, as well as her own autobiography. So I won’t try to cover everything about her life, but I’ll pick out a few things to talk about.

Dorrit’s scientific interests ranged from asteroids to variable stars. In the first part of her career, she worked as a Computer at the Harvard College Observatory (HCO), although her stint at Harvard was briefly interrupted by World War II. During the War, she volunteered to work for the Navy and then the Army calculating missile trajectories, including those for some of the earliest nuclear weapons. Although her time with the Navy was unpleasant at best when it came to living conditions and satisfaction with her job, she stayed on for a few years after the end of WWII before returning to HCO. Dorrit did not get along very well with Donald Menzel, who took over as Director of HCO in 1952, following Edward PIckering, and consequently she left in 1957 to join the faculty at Yale a a Senior Research Astronomer. Simultaneously, she took on the job of Director of the Maria Mitchell Observatory in Nantucket. (We’ll talk about Maria--pronounced like Mariah as in Mariah Carey--in a future post, don’t worry.)

(Image source)

Dorrit spent the school years at Yale and the summers at Maria Mitchell, where she started a summer research program for young women. The program continues today as an NSF-funded astronomy REU program (open to all genders now) and has expanded to include summer internships in a variety of fields including marine biology and natural history museum operations. (I...totally want to do that one!)

(A sky map of all the stars in the Yale Bright Star Catalog. Image source.)

While at Yale, Dorrit compiled and edited the last few versions of the Yale Bright Star Catalog (from the 1977 version through to the most recent, 1992 version) which is, as you may have guessed, a catalog of >9000 very bright stars in the sky. It is a list of every star bright enough that a human could see it from a dark, clear location. The catalog has a number of practical applications still to this day--every time I go observing, for example, I use a star from the YBSC to align and begin to focus the telescope before starting a night’s observations.

Among other honors, including an asteroid named after her, Dorrit Hoffleit was awarded the prestigious George Van Biesbroeck Prize in 1988, a prize that “honors a living individual for long-term extraordinary or unselfish service to astronomy, often beyond the requirements of his or her paid position”. In addition to her research and encouragement of women in astronomy, Dorrit wrote a large number of popular press articles for magazines such as Sky & Telescope, and an autobiography, Misfortunes as Blessings in Disguise. I got into professional astronomy shortly after Dorrit passed away, but many of my colleagues remember her fondly. She’s left quite an excellent legacy. If you want more details on her life, check out the sources below!

Sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorrit_Hoffleit https://aas.org/obituaries/e-dorrit-hoffleit-1907-2007 http://www.sheisanastronomer.org/index.php/history/dorrit-hoffleit http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/dorrit-hoffleit-19072007/ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/23/nyregion/23hoffleit.html?_r=0 http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=Dorrit https://www.aavso.org/media/jaavso/2830.pdf

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Great Lady Astronomers of History--Williamina Fleming

(Williamina Fleming, likely sometime in the 1890s. Image source.)

Williamina Paton Stevens Fleming was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1857. She was very clever and started teaching in the public schools at age 14. At 21, she moved to Boston with her husband, James Orr Fleming. Shortly after their move, Williamina became pregnant with her first child and James abandoned her. As a single mother, she needed a job to support herself and her son, so she went to work as a housekeeper for Edward Pickering, the director of the Harvard College Observatory.

(Harvard College Observatory in 1876. Image source.)

If you remember my post about Eva Leland, this might be starting to sound familiar. Williamina was in fact the housekeeper that Pickering hired in 1881, the first of the women who became known as the Harvard Computers. While at Harvard, Williamina accomplished many things, including devising a system used to classify stars based on the amount of hydrogen in their spectrum, giving the classes the letters A, B, C, etc., in order of decreasing hydrogen. Annie Jump Canon, who we’ll hear about in a later post, improved upon this classification by arranging the classes based on temperature, coming up with the well-known (and still used) OBAFGKM order.

(Cartoon showing relative sizes and colors of main-sequence stars in the different spectral classes. Image modified by me from this source.)

Williamina also cataloged more than 10,000 stars on the Harvard plates that would become part of the Henry Draper catalog, discovered 59 gaseous nebulae, 310 variable stars, and 10 novae (in the 25 years before her death, only 17 total novae were discovered, so she found more than half of them). Among the gaseous nebulae she found is one of the most famous, known as the Horsehead Nebula, which is located just below the left-most star in Orion’s belt.

On the left is a modern image of the Horsehead Nebula and surrounding region. (Image obtained here, although that doesn’t appear to be the original source, and they don’t cite where they got it. Perhaps here?) On the right is the original plate on which Williamina discovered the nebula, from the DASCH project. (Image comparison made by me!) If we zoom in on the field and rotate it ~90° counter-clockwise, it’s a bit easier to see where the name comes from:

(Image source)

In 1910, in conjunction with Pickering and Henry Norris Russell, Williamina discovered the existence of stars known as white dwarfs; this discovery was made possible because she had created and then used the hydrogen spectral classification system. White dwarfs are like the embers of dead stars, what’s left over after the other layers of the star have been ejected as the star dies. These outer layers form a planetary nebula and make for some of the prettiest space images. In the one below, called the Ring Nebula, you can actually see the white dwarf--it’s the star right in the center of the ring. White dwarfs are also the key stars in the two type of stellar explosions I research, novae and supernovae, so they are dear to my heart.

(The Ring Nebula. The white dot in the center of the blue/green region is the white dwarf, which is the remnant of the star that used to be there. As it evolved, the star expelled its outer layers of gas, which is what forms the pretty rings. Image source.)

In 1899, Williamina was named the Curator of Astronomical Photographs at Harvard and put in charge of all the staff. In 1905, she was the first American woman to be given honorary membership to the Royal Astronomical Society of London. (At the time of her death in 1911, there were only five other women total in the Society.) Williamina published a number of papers with Eva Leland and the other Harvard Computers as co-authors or contributing observers, including not only variable star observations but also papers describing their search for asteroids and other small bodies in our Solar System.

(Image source)

Williamina Fleming died of pneumonia in Boston in 1911. Her obituary was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and praises the “amount, effectiveness, and novelty” of her work, while also noting that she “yielded to none in her enjoyment of a football match, especially a match between Harvard and Yale”. Like many of the women we’ve discussed, Williamina has a crater on the moon named after her, though she shares the honor of Fleming Crater with Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin.

For the first time, I’ll leave you with a takeaway tl;dr message: although Williamina Fleming was never formally trained in math or science, she was a dedicated and clever astronomer who made some critically important discoveries, but still had fun outside of work. May we all be similar!

Sources http://www.sheisanastronomer.org/index.php/history/williamina-fleming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamina_Fleming http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/fleming.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleming_(crater) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fleming_crater_AS16-M-3001_ASU.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_dwarf http://www.projectcontinua.org/williamina-paton-fleming/

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Great Lady Astronomers of History -- Beatrice Tinsley

Next up in the list of astronomers to talk about from mamaliza‘s cross stitch is Beatrice Tinsley.

Beatrice Tinsley, née Hill, was born in England in 1941 and moved with her family to New Zealand, where she spent the rest of her youth. At age 14 she decided she wanted to be an astrophysicist and went on to get her bachelor's and master's at Canterbury University. Around that time she got married to Brian Tinsley, a physicist, and they moved to the US for Brian to start graduate school in Dallas, TX. Beatrice was unable to continue her schooling in Dallas, so she drove to Austin, TX, each week to get her Ph.D. at the University of Texas. It only took her ~2 years, which is super fast. Eventually, Beatrice left her husband and moved to Connecticut with her two children to become a professor at Yale University.

Tinsley's research centered around how galaxies change in time, and how we could use that information to understand the history and future of the Universe. She was particularly interested in how the evolution of stars within a galaxy can change how it looks to us from the outside, and what happens when multiple galaxies interact with each other. Tinsley was one of the first people to use our knowledge of stellar evolution to understand galactic evolution. She had some of the earliest models of protogalaxies, which are the giant gas clouds that eventually turn into galaxies. One of her big discoveries was that galaxies with identical shapes didn't necessarily have the same brightness or size, as had previously been believed.

After a short (only ~14 year) career, Tinsley died of melanoma. By that point she had written or co-written more than 100 scientific papers and won the prestigious Annie Jump Cannon award from the American Astronomical Society (AAS). After her death, the AAS created the a Beatrice Tinsley award in her honor. Additionally, she has a scientific institute, a mountain, and an asteroid named after here, as well as a play that tells the story of her life, called Bright Star.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_Tinsley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Beatrice_Tinsley.jpg (Image Source) http://www.sheisanastronomer.org/index.php/history/beatricetinsley http://blog.professorastronomy.com/2008/01/beatrice-tinsley.html http://www.aas.org/cswa/status/2005/JANUARY2005/BeatriceTinsley.html