o, b a fine girl, kiss me

Believe it or not, a female astronomer - Annie Cannon - is the one who came up with that mnemonic to help people remember the Harvard Scale for stellar energy, which is based on their spectral characteristics.

We even watched as the actors used diffraction gratings to look at the images captured on the photographic plates by the telescope at the Harvard Observatory.

That's where they were working in the first twenty years of the 20th century, as a time when women were fine as computers - i.e., ones who compute values - but could never actually use the telescopes themselves.

Who were "they"?

Well, the aforementioned Annie Cannon, who was the one in charge of the computers; Willamina, the former housekeeper of the man who ran the telescope, made a computer when the men given the task failed abysmally; and Henrietta Leavitt, the one who wanted the job in astronomy so much that she convinced her father, a minister, to give her the money set aside for her dowry, as she planned to devote her life to science.

That's pretty much what happened, too.

That's according to Lauren Gunderson, author of "Silent Sky", the play I watched tonight from my seat, right beside Mama's, in Jenkins Hall at Armstrong.

 

Henrietta left home, and the one sister she had, for life at a desk, doing research.

She only returned home after the father had a stroke and her sister needed help...

but she brought her research home with her.

That was a happy coincidence, as it turned out.

While listening to the religious symphony her sister had composed, Henrietta had an insight into the puzzle she'd been trying to solve and suddenly realized the pattern between the luminosity and the period of variables related to pulsing stars (the Cepheid variables) in the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds.

Right place, right time... for her then, for me tonight.

It took her sitting still for long hours, for years, to compile enough data to see that pattern.

Without her patience, humanity might never have had the proof that out Milky Way was not the only galaxy in space.

Nor would there have been a way to determine distances to those other galaxies.

Science takes much time, and much patience, to produce viable truths.

Amazing.

Here's another coincidence: Henrietta Leavitt died of cancer at the age of 53, just as Dorothy Ashby - the unseen, but still heard, star of the noon30 - had done, years later.

As I said, right place, right time, for me.

i thank You, God.