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Title:
The Glass Universe and “the glass ceiling”
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Abstract:
Half a million astronomical images on glass photographic plates, taken over the span of a century, constitute a “glass universe” at the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The observatory’s far-sighted director, Edward Pickering, conceived the project in the 1870s, when astrophotography was in its infancy. Funding for the ambitious mission came from two New York heiresses with abiding interests in astronomy, Anna Palmer Draper and Catherine Wolfe Bruce. As the collection of glass plates grew to include stellar spectra and star fields captured by telescopes in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, unusual employment opportunities opened for “women’s work” at the observatory. At first the typical female job title was computer or assistant, but in time several women came to be regarded as full-fledged astronomers and made important contributions to the field. Henrietta Leavitt, for example, noticed the relation of periodicity and luminosity among Cepheid variable stars that became the basis for interstellar and intergalactic distance scales. Annie Jump Cannon organized the stars into a classification system still used today. Cecilia Payne (later Gaposchkin) took advantage of a fellowship to leave England for America, where she became the first person to earn a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard University. Her dissertation gave the first—shocking—indication that stars consist primarily of hydrogen.
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