SCOTTISH MAID
Williamina Fleming was definitely another Harvard computer and her work is finally receiving public acclaim. She discovered the extremely hot, dense ‘white dwarf’ stars and was the first person to see the Horsehead Nebula beyond the eastern star of the constellation Orion – admittedly on a photographic plate and not in glorious technicolour like the images produced from the Hubble Space Telescope. She also classified over 10,000 stars, something astronomer Herbert Hall Turner deemed ‘an achievement bordering on the marvellous’. Originally from Scotland, Fleming worked as a teacher before emigrating to Boston with her husband in 1878. When Fleming was pregnant with their first child, he abandoned her, forcing Fleming to seek a position at the observatory as a maid. Fortunately, the observatory director at the time, Edward Pickering,
recognised her intelligence and talents and she soon switched from dusting the furniture to working as a computer. She would go on to become the observatory’s first Curator of Astronomical Photographs and one of America’s most prominent female astronomers. In 1906 Fleming became the first American woman elected as an honorary member of the RAS. Born a few years after Fleming, in 1863, Annie Jump Cannon built on Fleming’s work and became a renowned expert in classifying stars. She also combined two stellar classification methods – a joint one by Fleming and Pickering and the other by Antonia Maury. The Fleming–Pickering method was an alphabetical one dividing stars into twenty-two classes dependent on hydrogen content – A-type stars containing the most hydrogen. Combining the two methods meant these spectral classes, which are still in use today, no longer follow an A, B, C order, but instead run as follows: O, B, A, F, G, K, M. This used
“Fleming was the first person to see the Horsehead Nebula.”
OPPOSITE: Williamina Fleming. Harvard College Observatory, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives ABOVE: The Horsehead Nebula as captured by Hubble. NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team
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THE YEA R IN SPACE
HIDDE N FIGU RES O F ASTRO NO MY
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