Date: July 12, 2009
Title: Women on the Moon
Podcaster: Mark Tillotson
Links: Today in Astronomy: http://todayinastronomy.blogspot.com/
Lunar Mark: http://lunarmark.blogspot.com/
The Astronomy Compendium: http://astronomycompendium.wikispaces.com/
LVAAS: http://www.lvaas.net/
Description: It has been 40 years since man first set foot on the Moon. As part of the celebration of the International Year of Astronomy and the Apollo 11 landing, I would like to introduce you to the “Women on the Moon”. One of the IYA cornerstone projects is called “She is an Astronomer” and it is designed to promote gender equality in astronomy and science in general. This is my contribution to that effort.
Bio: Mark Tillotson is an engineer and amateur astronomer living in Pennsylvania. He is interested in the Moon, the history of astronomy and science in general. Mark is the author of two blogs, Today in Astronomy and Lunar Mark, and created the Astronomy Compendium; a wiki-spaces site designed as a collection of information about the people, places and events that shaped the science of Astronomy into the form we know today. He is the Star Party coordinator at the Lehigh Valley Amateur Astronomical Society and a communications team member for IYA2009 US; posting updates on Facebook as IYA Cosmos and on Twitter as IYA_US.
Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by Mark Jones in honor of the Ecumenical Center for Religion and Health, providing counseling services to the children and families of the San Antonio area. Learn more about the Ecumenical Center at ecrh.org.
Transcript:
It has been 40 years since man first set foot on the Moon. As part of the celebration of the International Year of Astronomy and the Apollo 11 landing, I would like to introduce you to the Women on the Moon.
Music clip: Fly Me to the Moon, Utada Hikaru,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIztXr6awaM
Hi! This is Lunar Mark. I am an amateur astronomer and a self-professed Lunatic from eastern Pennsylvania. Welcome to the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast. I’m back again to talk to you about some more lunar nomenclature. One of the IYA cornerstone projects is called She is an Astronomer and it is designed to promote gender equality in astronomy and science in general. This is my contribution to that effort.
There are over 2,200 named features on the Moon and 74 are named for women. 47 are female names from various cultures and 27 are named in honor of particular women. I’d like to highlight a few of these women.
Maria Mitchell (August 1, 1818 – June 28, 1889) was the first woman astronomer in the United States. She discovered a comet which came to be known as “Miss Mitchell’s Comet”.
October 1, 1847, was a clear night. Maria Mitchell was at her telescope on the roof of her parent’s house observing a star. She had slipped away from the party going on downstairs to sweep the heavens. As she focused on one particular star it occurred to her that this fuzzy star was actually a comet. She returned to the parlor to tell her father what she had found. Mr. Mitchell ran upstairs to the telescope and located the fuzzy object. He immediately declared it to be a comet. The next day Mr. Mitchell wrote to Professor Bond, at Cambridge, announcing the discovery. Discovering comets wasn’t unusual during this time but the only other woman to have discovered one was Caroline Herschel.
Maria Mitchell was born on Nantucket island, off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her father, William Mitchell, taught both his sons and daughters astronomy and celestial navigation and her mother, Lydia Coleman, encouraged her daughters to learn occupations and seek independence.
Mitchell was the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the first woman Professor of Astronomy in the United States (at Vassar College). In 1875 Mitchell was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Women where she promoted higher education and suffrage for women. After her death, the Maria Mitchell Astronomical Society was created in her honor. In 1902, the Maria Mitchell Association (MMA) was founded. It brings the legacy of the Nantucket astronomer to new generations. In 1905 Mitchell was elected to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans.
Caroline Herschel (March 16, 1750 – January 9, 1848) was a German-born English astronomer, the sister of William Herschel with whom she worked throughout both of their careers. Her most significant contribution to astronomy was the discovery of several comets and in particular the periodic comet 35P/Herschel-Rigollet, which bears her name.
In 1828 the Royal Astronomical Society presented her with their Gold Medal for this work – no woman would be awarded it again until Vera Rubin in 1996. In 1835, along with Mary Somerville, she was elected to honorary membership of the Royal Astronomical Society; they were the first honorary women members. In 1838 she was also elected as a member of the Royal Irish Academy. In 1846 at the age of 96, she was awarded the Gold Medal for Science by the King of Prussia.
Annie Jump Cannon (December 11, 1863 – April 13, 1941) was an American astronomer whose cataloguing work was instrumental in the development of stellar classification. In 1896 Annie became a member of Pickering’s Women, the women hired by Harvard Observatory director Edward Pickering to complete the Draper Catalog – the mapping and defining all the stars in the sky.
With Edward Pickering, she is credited with the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme, which was the first serious attempt to organize and classify stars based on their temperatures. Annie’s work was “theory laced” but simplified. The way she could see the stars or stellar spectra was extraordinary. She applied a division of stars into the familiar spectral classes O, B, A, F, G, K, M. She gave her system a mnemonic of “Oh Be a Fine Girl and Kiss Me.”
Her Draper Catalogs listed nearly 400,000 stars and were valued as the work of a single observer. Annie also published many other catalogues of variable stars including 300 that she discovered. Her career lasted more than 40 years.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt (July 4, 1868 – December 12, 1921) was an American astronomer. Leavitt began work in 1893 at Harvard College Observatory. She was hired Edward Pickering to measure and catalog the brightness of stars in the observatory’s photographic plate collection. She noted thousands of variable stars in images of the Magellanic Clouds. In 1908 she published her results in the Annals of the Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College, noting that a few of the variables showed a pattern: brighter ones appeared to have longer periods. After further study, she confirmed in 1912 that the variable stars of greater intrinsic luminosity—actually Cepheid Variables—did indeed have longer periods, and the relationship was quite close and predictable. This relationship would be an important yardstick for measuring distances in the Universe, if it could be calibrated. One year after Leavitt reported her results, Ejnar Hertzsprung determined the distance of several Cepheids in the Milky Way, and with this calibration the distance to any Cepheid could be determined.
At the time, it was not clear that millions of (what we now call) galaxies were actually outside of the Milky Way. Their distance could not be measured until a tool existed. Cepheids were then detected in the Andromeda Galaxy by Edwin Hubble. These Cepheids were an important part of the evidence that galaxies are far outside of the Milky Way. Our picture of the universe was changed forever, largely because of Leavitt’s discovery.
The accomplishments of Edwin Hubble were made possible by Leavitt’s groundbreaking research. Hubble himself often said that Leavitt deserved the Nobel Prize for her work.
Annie Scott Dill Maunder, née Russell (April 14, 1868 – September 15, 1947) was a British astronomer and mathematician. Annie studied at Cambridge University (Girton College) and in 1889 she passed the degree examinations with honors, as the top mathematician of her year. However, the restrictions of the period did not allow her to actually receive the B.A. she had otherwise earned.
In 1891 she began work at the Greenwich Royal Observatory, serving as one of the “Lady Computers” assigned to the solar department. There she assisted E. Walter Maunder, and she spent much time photographing the Sun and tracking the movements of sunspots. The two were married in 1895 and Annie was required to resign from her job. However, the two continued to collaborate, and Annie accompanied Walter on solar eclipse expeditions.
She published “The Heavens and their Story” in 1910, with her husband as the co-author. (She was credited by her husband as the primary author.) In 1916 she became the first woman elected to the Royal Astronomical Society. The investigations of the couple demonstrated a correlation between the variation in sunspot numbers and the climate of the Earth, leading to the discovery that the decreased period of solar activity during the Maunder Minimum likely resulted in the “little ice age”.
Lise Meitner (November 7, 1878 – October 27, 1968) was a Swedish physicist who studied radioactivity and nuclear physics. Lise Meitner was part of the team that discovered nuclear fission, an achievement for which her colleague Otto Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize. Meitner is often mentioned as one of the most glaring examples of scientific achievement overlooked by the Nobel committee.
In 1966 Hahn, Fritz Strassmann and Meitner together were awarded the Enrico Fermi Award. She was honored as “Woman of the Year” by the National Women’s Press Club (USA) in 1946, and received the Max Planck Medal of the German Physics Society in 1949. An even rarer honor was given to her in 1997 when element 109 was named meitnerium in her honor.
Antonia Maury (March 21, 1866–January 8, 1952) was an American astronomer who published an important early catalog of stellar spectra.
Antonia Maury was educated at Vassar College, graduating in 1887. She was employed at Harvard College Observatory (HCO), where she observed stellar spectra and published a catalogue of classifications in 1897 (Spectra of Bright Stars Photographed with the 11-inch Draper Telescope as part of the Henry Draper Memorial, Annals of Harvard College Observatory, vol. 28, pp.1-128).
The director of Harvard Observatory at the time, Edward Pickering, disagreed with Maury’s system of classification and Maury left the Observatory. However, Ejnar Hertzsprung realized the value of her classifications and used them in his system of identifying giant and dwarf stars.
In 1908, Antonia Maury returned to the Harvard Observatory where she remained for many years. Her most famous work there was the spectroscopic analysis of the binary star Beta Lyrae, published in 1933 (The Spectral Changes of Beta Lyrae, Annals of Harvard College Observatory, vol. 84, no. 8). In 1943, Antonia Maury was awarded the Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy by the American Astronomical Society.
Sharon Christa Corrigan McAuliffe (September 2, 1948 – January 28, 1986) was an American teacher from Concord, New Hampshire (my home state). In 1985, McAuliffe was selected from more than 11,000 applicants to participate in the NASA Teacher in Space Project, and she was scheduled to become the first teacher in space. As a member of mission STS-51-L, she was planning to conduct experiments and teach two lessons from Space Shuttle Challenger. On January 28, 1986, her spacecraft disintegrated 73 seconds after launch, and she was one of seven crew members killed in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. After her death, schools and scholarships were named in her honor, and in 2004 she was awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.
For a full list of the Women on the Moon you can follow the links in the show notes or visit the-Moon Wiki. I also invite you to encourage both girls and boys to discover the joys of science and astronomy.
Thanks for listening and remember to invite a friend to look up at the night sky!
This is Lunar Mark, pointing my finger at the Moon!
The information for this podcast comes from Wikipedia.
Full list of names from The-Moon Wiki:
http://the-moon.wikispaces.com/Nomenclature-Women
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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