Harvard’s Forgotten Female Astronomers

When a 23-year-old single mother started working as a maid for Harvard professor Edward C. Pickering, class of 1865, he didn’t expect her to change our understanding of the stars. It was 1879 and Williamina P. S. Fleming needed work: She had immigrated to Boston a year earlier, only to be abandoned by her husband shortly thereafter. Back in Scotland, Fleming had been a schoolteacher — she was a quick learner, and she began teaching when she was just 14. Pickering hired Fleming shortly after he became the director of the Harvard College Observatory. Pickering wanted to gather information about all the stars that are visible from Earth and organize it in a massive catalog. He started taking thousands of glass plate photographs through his telescope. But to process all the data, he needed a team of scientists to examine each photo, correct the image for the distorting effect of Earth’s atmosphere, and then record the properties of the stars in spreadsheets. Read More…