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Loading... The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars (original 2016; edition 2016)by Dava Sobel (Author)
Work InformationThe Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel (2016)
  
No current Talk conversations about this book.  bell7 | Dec 31, 2024 |    ) AmyMacEvilly | Jun 12, 2024 | Take Willamina Fleming, for example. Born in Scotland in 1857, she was abandoned by her husband, leaving her with a child to support. Working initially as a maid at the home of Edward Pickering, the director of the Observatory, she was employed by him to examine and catalog photographic plates of stellar spectra. Eventually she devised a classification system of stars which became the basis of the alphabetical system still used today. It’s because of this Scottish maid that we refer to our Sun as a G-type star, for example. There were many other women employed by the Observatory who went on to make major scientific contributions. Annie Jump Cannon, who improved on the classification system; Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who discovered the luminosity-period relationship of Cepheid variable stars; the list goes on. Sobel makes all of this a fascinating story. My only complaint (perhaps due to my faltering memory these days) is that there are SO many names mentioned that it sometimes became difficult to remember who was being talked about at a particular time. ( ) davidrgrigg | Mar 23, 2024 | ) cspiwak | Mar 6, 2024 |  ) terran | Feb 21, 2024 |
AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
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HTML:From #1 New York Times bestselling author Dava Sobel, the "inspiring" (People), little-known true story of women's landmark contributions to astronomy A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017 Named one of the best books of the year by NPR, The Economist, Smithsonian, Nature, and NPR's Science Friday Nominated for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award "A joy to read.” —The Wall Street Journal In the mid-nineteenth century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or “human computers,” to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night. At the outset this group included the wives, sisters, and daughters of the resident astronomers, but soon the female corps included graduates of the new women's colleges—Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith. As photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the ladies turned from computation to studying the stars captured nightly on glass photographic plates. The “glass universe” of half a million plates that Harvard amassed over the ensuing decades—through the generous support of Mrs. Anna Palmer Draper, the widow of a pioneer in stellar photography—enabled the women to make extraordinary discoveries that attracted worldwide acclaim. They helped discern what stars were made of, divided the stars into meaningful categories for further research, and found a way to measure distances across space by starlight. Their ranks included Williamina Fleming, a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid who went on to identify ten novae and more than three hundred variable stars; Annie Jump Cannon, who designed a stellar classification system that was adopted by astronomers the world over and is still in use; and Dr. Cecilia Helena Payne, who in 1956 became the first ever woman professor of astronomy at Harvard—and Harvard’s first female department chair. Elegantly written and enriched by excerpts from letters, diaries, and memoirs, The Glass Universe is the hidden history of the women whose contributions to the burgeoning field of astronomy forever changed our understanding of the stars and our place in the universe. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)522.19744409252Science Astronomy Techniques, procedures, apparatus, equipment, materials Observatories History, reports and serial publications of observatoriesLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.74)
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Wikipedia in English
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The subtitle of the book is "how the ladies of the Harvard Observatory took the measure of the stars." My guess is that with other books coming out such as Hidden Figures and The Radium Girls focusing on forgotten women's history, that the publishers may have chosen to focus on that aspect of the story. It hardly hints at the sprawling narrative within, however, that spans roughly 70 years and many people, both men and women, who worked with the Observatory to advance astronomy significantly. I got a little lost in the narrative, to be honest, and wish I had discovered the list of people in the back before I was almost finished the book. The science is kept fairly light and accessible for a non-specialist like me, and I am left wanting to look up even more of the astronomers highlighted, such as Adelaide Ames who published articles with then-director Harlow Shapley, and Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin who got a doctorate, discovered what stars are made of, and kept working even after she married. There's much more to be found between these pages, but if you're anything like me you'll be left wanting to learn a lot more. (