The Sky Is for Everyone

Women Astronomers in Their Own Words

Virginia Trimble, David A. Weintraub, Virginia Trimble, David A. Weintraub

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780691253916, 9780691207100
• eBook ISBN: 9780691237367
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies

An inspiring anthology of writings by trailblazing women astronomers from around the globe

The Sky Is for Everyone is an internationally diverse collection of autobiographical essays by women who broke down barriers and changed the face of modern astronomy. Virginia Trimble and David Weintraub vividly describe how, before 1900, a woman who wanted to study the stars had to have a father, brother, or husband to provide entry, and how the considerable intellectual skills of women astronomers were still not enough to enable them to pry open doors of opportunity for much of the twentieth century. After decades of difficult struggles, women are closer to equality in astronomy than ever before. Trimble and Weintraub bring together the stories of the tough and determined women who flung the doors wide open. Taking readers from 1960 to today, this triumphant anthology serves as an inspiration to current and future generations of women scientists while giving voice to the history of a transformative era in astronomy.

With contributions by Neta A. Bahcall, Beatriz Barbuy, Ann Merchant Boesgaard, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Catherine Cesarsky, Poonam Chandra, Xuefei Chen, Cathie Clarke, Judith Gamora Cohen, France Anne Córdova, Anne Pyne Cowley, Bo?ena Czerny, Wendy L. Freedman, Yilen Gómez Maqueo Chew, Gabriela González, Saeko S. Hayashi, Martha P. Haynes, Roberta M. Humphreys, Vicky Kalogera, Gillian Knapp, Shazrene S. Mohamed, Carole Mundell, Priyamvada Natarajan, Dara J. Norman, Hiranya Peiris, Judith Lynn Pipher, Dina Prialnik, Anneila I. Sargent, Sara Seager, Gražina Tautvaišien?, Silvia Torres-Peimbert, Virginia Trimble, Meg Urry, Ewine F. van Dishoeck, Patricia Ann Whitelock, Sidney Wolff, and Rosemary F. G. Wyse.

Chapter 1

Beginnings

In France, Dorothea Klumpke (1861–1942) earned her Docteur-ès-Sciences at the University of Paris in mathematical astronomy in 1893, after completing her thesis, “L’etude des Anneaux de Saturne” (A study of the rings of Saturn), thereby becoming the first woman to achieve the academic distinction of earning an advanced degree for work done in astronomy. She then began her distinguished career as the director of the Bureau des Measures at Observatoire de Paris, leading the effort there to produce a section of the great photographic star chart known as the Carte du Ciel. In 1901, she married astronomer Isaac Roberts and moved with him to England. After his death in 1904, Klumpke Roberts returned to Observatoire de Paris, where she continued to carry out astronomical research, and in 1929 published The Isaac Roberts Atlas of 52 Regions, a Guide to William Herschel’s Fields of Nebulosity. In 1934, she was elected Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.

Professional successes like hers, built on her own credentials, accomplishments, and intellectual merits, were rare for women before 1900. Instead, most of the few women who in previous centuries had any role in astronomy typically gained access through their husbands, brothers, or fathers.

More than two centuries earlier, in Danzig (now Gdańsk), Poland, in 1663, sixteen-year-old Catherina Elisabetha Koopman (1647–93) married fifty-two-year-old astronomer Johannes Hevelius, which gave her access to his observatory, Stellaburgum, where she became his assistant. In 1687, as Elisabetha Hevelius, she would publish the catalogue she and Johannes had worked on for decades, the Catalogus Stellarum Fixarum, which included the positions of 1,564 stars, including 600 newly identified stars and a dozen newly named constellations.

Beginning in 1774, in Bath, England, Caroline Lucretia Herschel (1750–1848) assisted her older brother William with his observational work, cataloging thousands of previously unknown star clusters and nebulae, and learning to make her own observations and astronomical calculations. On her own, she discovered eight comets and the galaxy NGC 205. But her most important work was done in helping her brother put together the Catalogue of One Thousand New Nebulae and Clusters of Stars, which was first published in 1786 with William as sole author. They added another 1,000 objects to this catalogue in a 1789 paper, and 500 more in a third version published in 1802, each time with William as the only author credited. Later, she helped her nephew John Herschel expand the inventory to more than 5,000 objects in his 1825 Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars. For her efforts on this project, in 1828 the Astronomical Society of London (which in 1831 would become the Royal Astronomical Society) honored her with their Gold Medal and then, in 1835, elected her as an honorary member (according to the organization’s by-laws at that time, women were ineligible for election as regular members). Her career, important and limited as it was, was only possible because her brother and nephew needed her help.

Mary Fairfax Somerville (1780–1872), known in her time as the “Queen of Science,” was also elected as an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1835. Somerville was an exception to the rule that women who contributed in a significant way to astronomy before 1900 did so because they were the wife, sister, or daughter of an astronomer. Her second husband, William (a surgeon), encouraged her, but she forged her professional career independent of his. In 1826, Somerville’s “The Magnetic Properties of the Violet Rays of the Solar Spectrum” was the first research article written by a woman published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. She would later cement her reputation as a popularizer of science, writing several books, including The Mechanism of the Heavens in 1831 and On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences in 1834.

A half century later, Margaret Lindsay Huggins (1848–1915) was instrumental in furthering the successful career of her husband, William. Beginning in the late 1870s, she was a participant with him in photographic and spectroscopic research, including his studies of the Orion Nebula and the planets, and conducted some of her own research at their private observatory in London, England. With William, she wrote Atlas of Representative Stellar Spectra, published in 1899, and was elected (an honorary member) to the Royal Astronomical Society in 1903.

Also in the late nineteenth century, Mary Proctor (1862–1957) learned to help her father, the famous English astronomer and popular science writer Richard Proctor, with his manuscripts and in founding and publishing the journal Knowledge, which led to her own career lecturing about astronomy and writing about astronomy for children. She was elected as a member of the British Astronomical Association (BAA) in 1897 and to the Royal Astronomical Society (a society with, relatively, more professionals than the BAA) in 1916 as one of its first female Fellows.

Another British woman of this era, Mary Evershed (1867–1949), worked closely with her husband, John, who directed the Observatory at Kodaikanal in India. Her observations of solar prominences were published in a single-author paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1913.

The only other women named honorary members of the Royal Astronomical Society prior to the change in the rules in 1915 that permitted women to be elected as ordinary members were Anne Sheepshanks (1789–1876), whose claim to fame was donating significant sums of money to the University of Cambridge to promote astronomical research, Agnes Mary Clerke (1842–1907), who was considered Somerville’s successor as a well-received popularizer and historian of astronomy, and two human computers at the Harvard College Observatory, Williamina Fleming (1857–1911) and Annie Jump Cannon (1863–1941), who made measurements and computed the positions, brightnesses, and spectral types of stars whose images were found on photographic glass plates obtained by (male) Observatory astronomers.

Fleming began her astronomical work because she was in the right place at the right time—in 1881, she was the housekeeper for Harvard College Observatory director Edward C. Pickering when he invited her to start working at the Observatory as a computer. She assigned spectral types to, and calculated positions and brightnesses for, most of the nearly 10,000 stars included in the first Draper Catalogue of Stellar Spectra, published in 1890. She continued her work as a computer until her death in 1911.

Cannon, who worked at the Observatory from 1896 until 1940, is perhaps the most famous of the Harvard College Observatory computers. She put her stamp on modern astronomy through her work classifying the spectra of more than 225,000 stars and reinventing the stellar classification system, which was formally adopted for use by the international astronomy community in 1922. Her system of stellar spectral classes, used in the nine-volume expansion of the Henry Draper Catalogue published in the years from 1918 to 1924, is still in use today. Cannon, who in 1938 was appointed as the William C. Bond Astronomer and Curator of Astronomical Photographs at the Observatory, was the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford.

In 1888, Antonia Maury (1866–1952) also became one of Pickering’s famous computers (she continued to work at the Harvard College Observatory until 1933), in large part because she had a family connection: her aunt Anna Palmer Draper (1839–1914), the widow of Henry Draper, had donated the money to the Observatory that supported the work of producing the Draper Catalogue and the Henry Draper Catalogue. Maury discovered that some stars had narrow and others had broad spectral lines. And though her boss was not interested in this way of classifying stars on the basis of the widths of their spectral lines, others were. Maury’s discovery has been used by astronomers for more than a century to help distinguish evolved stars with extended envelopes (giants, which have narrow lines) from stars still living on hydrogen fusion in their cores (dwarfs, or main-sequence stars, which have broad lines).

Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868–1921), who worked as another of Pickering’s computers from 1902 until 1921, made perhaps the most important astronomical discovery of her time when in the 1900s she identified a few handfuls of stars known as Cepheid variable stars—stars that cycle from bright to faint and then to bright again in a regular but peculiar and identifiable way—and showed that their periods of variation in brightness were positively correlated with their maximum brightnesses. She published a paper, “1777 Variable Stars in the Magellanic Clouds,” with these results in the Annals of the Harvard College Observatory in 1908 as the sole author. It included the understated conclusion that “it is worthy of notice that … the brighter stars have the longer periods.” By 1912, Pickering recognized the importance of her work, and so her follow-up paper, “Periods of 25 Variable Stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud,” was published under his name, only, though he was kind enough to add the note “prepared by Miss Leavitt” to the publication. This relationship, now known as the Leavitt Law, was the critical discovery that allowed Harlow Shapley to discover the structure of the Milky Way, Edwin Hubble to discover that the Milky Way Galaxy is not the entire Universe and that most of the galaxies that make up the Universe are moving apart, and modern astronomers to use the Hubble Space Telescope to improve measurements of the distance scale of the Universe.

Cannon, Fleming, Maury, and Leavitt are just four of the more than forty women who were hired to make measurements of stars found in the Harvard College Observatory photographic plate collection in the years prior to World War I, starting in 1875 when the Observatory changed a policy such that it could hire women onto the staff. The first woman hired was Director William Rogers’s wife, Mrs. R. T. Rogers, who would work at the Observatory for twenty-three years. That same year, Anna Winlock (1857–1904), the eldest daughter of the deceased former Observatory director Joseph Winlock, was put on staff, where she would remain a computer for twenty-eight years. Anna’s sister Louisa (1860–1916) started her twenty-nine-year career as a computer in 1886. And in 1879, Selina Cranch Bond (1831–1920), the daughter of the first Observatory director, William Cranch Bond, joined the staff, where she would continue working for twenty-seven years.

Harvard computer Adelaide Ames (1900–1932) was Observatory director Harlow Shapley’s first graduate student (starting in 1921) and in 1924 became the first woman to earn a MA in astronomy at Radcliffe. Together, they published “A Survey of the External Galaxies Brighter than the Thirteenth Magnitude” (generally known as the Shapley-Ames Catalogue of Bright Galaxies) in 1932.

Another woman who started as a Harvard computer (1907–12) after receiving her AB degree from Radcliffe in 1907 was Margaret Harwood (1885–1979). She, however, spent most of her career elsewhere. In 1912, after receiving a fellowship from the Maria Mitchell Association on Nantucket Island, she stayed, becoming the director of the Maria Mitchell Observatory in 1916 after completing her MA degree at the University of California, thus becoming the first woman astronomer to direct an independent observatory in the United States. She remained as director until 1956 and spent her career measuring the variability of light received from stars and asteroids and mentoring several generations of up-and-coming women astronomers.

Margaret Walton Mayall (1902–95) spent the first thirty years of her career as a Harvard computer, but she is best known for the subsequent twenty years, which she spent as Director of the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO). She started working at the Observatory in 1924 and continued until 1955. After earning her MA in astronomy from Radcliffe in 1927, she worked in partnership with Annie Jump Cannon until 1941 and then completed Cannon’s unfinished work, which she published in 1949 as The Henry Draper Extension: The Annie J. Cannon Memorial. Finally, beginning in 1954 and continuing until 1973, she served as Director of the AAVSO and oversaw the transition of the organization from an activity headquartered and run by the Harvard College Observatory into an independent, nonprofit, scientific organization.

Harvard was not the only observatory that used talented women as inexpensive labor. Annie Scott Dill Maunder (1868–1947) was hired as a human computer in 1890 at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, thereby becoming one of the first women in England to be paid for her work in astronomy. Maunder is best known for the work she did with her husband, Walter, discovering the pattern in which over a period of eleven years sunspots appear at successively lower solar latitudes and then repeat this cycle. This so-called butterfly pattern is a manifestation of the twenty-two-year-long solar sunspot cycle. Along with Mary Proctor, she was elected with the first cohort of women to become Fellows of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1916.

After completing a master’s degree in astronomy at Mount Holyoke College in 1906, Jennie Belle Lasby (1882–1959) was immediately hired as the first woman computer at Mount Wilson Observatory (MtW), in California, where she would work until 1913, publishing an article on the rotation of the Sun and writing several articles on spectroscopy with Walter Adams. She then worked in 1915 with J. C. Kapteyn at Potsdam Observatory, taught at Carleton College for the duration of World War I as a war-replacement instructor, and then taught astronomy at Santa Ana College in California from 1919 until 1946.

Just months after Lasby started at MtW she was joined by Cora Gertrude Burwell (1883–1982), who, after graduating from Mount Holyoke in 1906, became the second of the female computers at MtW, where she would work until 1949. She would publish nearly forty papers in her career, including two catalogues of hot stars with bright hydrogen emission lines.

Many of these women had extraordinary careers as computers at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first de...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Prelude
• 1. Beginnings
• 2. Anne Pyne Cowley (PhD, 1963): Navigating My Life with the Stars
• 3. Ann Merchant Boesgaard (PhD, 1966): Making Things Work
• 4. Sidney Wolff (PhD, 1966): Changing the Landscape
• 5. Jocelyn Bell Burnell (PhD, 1968): Kites Rise against the Wind
• 6. Virginia Trimble (PhD, 1968): Breaking through the Telescopic Glass Ceiling
• 7. Roberta M. Humphreys (PhD, 1969): Be Your Own Advocate
• 8. Silvia Torres-Peimbert (PhD, 1969): An Astronomer in Mexico
• 9. Neta A. Bahcall (PhD, 1970): My Life in Astronomy
• 10. Catherine Cesarsky (PhD, 1971): Equations, Satellites, and Telescopes
• 11. Judith (Judy) Gamora Cohen (PhD, 1971): A Long and Winding Road
• 12. Judith Lynn Pipher (PhD, 1971): Taking Advantage of Opportunity
• 13. Gillian (Jill) Knapp (PhD, 1972): Princeton 1984
• 14. Patricia Ann Whitelock (PhD, 1976): The Southern Half of the Sky
• 15. Anneila I. Sargent (PhD, 1977): A Long Way for a Wee Lassie
• 16. Martha P. Haynes (PhD, 1978): Hands-on Adventures with Telescopes: From the Backyard to Cerro Chajnantor
• 17. France Anne Córdova (PhD, 1979): The Learn’d Astronomer Discovers the Policy World
• 18. Dina Prialnik (PhD, 1980): From Stars to Comets and Back
• 19. Beatriz Barbuy (PhD, 1982): From Stargazing the Southern Cross to Probing the Depths of the History of the Milky Way
• 20. Rosemary (Rosie) F. G. Wyse (PhD, 1983): A Journey through Space and Time
• 21. Bożena Czerny (PhD, 1984): A Fortunate Sequence of Events
• 22. Ewine F. van Dishoeck (PhD, 1984): Building a Worldwide Astrochemistry Community
• 23. Wendy L. Freedman (PhD, 1984): My Astronomical Journey
• 24. Meg Urry (PhD, 1984): The Gentlemen and Me
• 25. Cathie Clarke (PhD, 1987): An Astronomer (Not a Pirate!) of Penzance
• 26. Saeko S. Hayashi (PhD, 1987): From Six Meters to Thirty Meters, Ever Expanding Horizons
• 27. Gražina Tautvaišienė (PhD, 1988): The Unfading Joy of Being an Astronomer
• 28. Carole Mundell (PhD, 1995): Inspired by a Maths Dress
• 29. Gabriela (Gaby) González (PhD, 1995): Gravitational Love
• 30. Vicky Kalogera (PhD, 1997): Not Taking “No” for an Answer: Learning How to Persist and Persevere with a Smile
• 31. Priyamvada Natarajan (PhD, 1999): Adventures Mapping the Dark Universe
• 32. Dara J. Norman (PhD, 1999): On Becoming an Astronomer and Advancing Science
• 33. Sara Seager (PhD, 1999): Adventures in the Search for Other Earths
• 34. Hiranya Peiris (PhD, 2003): From Serendip to Serendipity
• 35. Poonam Chandra (PhD, 2005): A Train to the Stars
• 36. Xuefei Chen (PhD, 2005): Staring at the Stars
• 37. Shazrene S. Mohamed (PhD, 2009): The Sky Is for Everyone
• 38. Yilen Gómez Maqueo Chew (PhD, 2010): Flipping Tables from the Sonoran Desert to the Stars
• 39. Postlude
• Further Reading and Additional Resources
• Index of Subjects
• Index of People