‘The Glass Universe’ celebrates astronomy’s unsung heroines
Women in the 19th century played underappreciated role in mapping and understanding the stars

SHINING STARS In the late 1890s, Harvard observatory hired women as “computers” to document data captured on glass plate images of the night sky. Their observations and ideas, described in a new book, led to such advances in astronomy as how to measure the distance to stars.
Harvard College Observatory/Wikimedia Commons
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