Oklahoma City Astronomy Club Meeting

Free to the public and all are welcome to attend.

Our July program will be a conversation over Zoom with author, historian, and biographer Dava Sobel. The program will be titled, "Building the Glass Universe." We will have a conversation about Ms. Sobel's career and the critically acclaimed books she has written. Our focus will be on her 2016 book, The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars.
 

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. Initially, they could not earn Ph.D. 's in astronomy nor were they allowed to even enter the observatories.  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, Henry Draper—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.
 

Her stories are known to take readers on a trip back in time, placing you squarely in the center of major discoveries as they unfold. Backed by masterful research, she brings you the story behind the story.  She examines how we know what we know and likes to examine problems that people don’t view as problems. The “longitude problem” is the most obvious example.