As mulheres do Harvard College Observatory: Henrietta Swan Leavitt - a mulher que descobriu como medir a distância das galáxias

ResumoNo final do século XIX e início do século XX, algumas mudanças ocorreram na área da astronomia, entre elas, o desenvolvimento técnico/tecnológico, o aparecimento de novos observatórios e juntamente com eles o aperfeiçoamento dos telescópios e a introdução da fotografia na astronomia, que possibilitou o registro das observações que antes eram feitas através de desenhos. Outra mudança que ocorreu foi a entrada de mulheres na astronomia, o registro fotográfico de observações astronômicas permitiu, que em um ambiente masculino, mulheres pudessem adentrar e fazer suas pesquisas, pois embora não lhes fosse permitido fazer observações noturnas elas poderiam utilizar as chapas fotográficas. Para exemplificar a importância do trabalho feminino nesta época, vamos mostrar a pesquisa e de Henrietta Swan Leavitt que descobriu a Relação Período-Luminosidade de Estrelas Variáveis.Palavras-chave: História da Ciência; Mulheres na Astronomia; Régua Cósmica; Henrietta Swan Leavitt; Relação Período-luminosidade.AbstractIn the late 19th and early 20th, some changes occurred in the area of astronomy, among them technical / technological development, the appearance of new observatories and together with them the improvement of telescopes and the introduction of photography in astronomy that made possible the registration from earlier observations made through drawings. Another change that occurred was the entry of women into astronomy, the photographic record of astronomical observations allowed that in a masculine environment women could enter and do their research, because although they were not allowed to make nocturnal observations they could use photographic plates. To exemplify the importance of female work at this time, let's show the research and from Henrietta Swan Leavitt who discovered the Period-Luminosity Relationship of Variable Stars.Keywords: History of Science; Women in Astronomy; Cosmic Ruler; Henrietta Swan Leavitt; Period-luminosity relationship.

Project PHaEDRA: Preserving Harvard’s Early Data and Research in Astronomy

The staff of Wolbach Library, in collaboration with partners at both the Smith-sonian Institution and Harvard University, has begun a complex digitization and transcriptioneffort aimed at making a large collection of historical astronomy research more findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). This collection of material was originally produced from the mid-18th century through the early 20th century by researchers at the Harvard College Observatory and was recently re-discovered in the HCO Plate Stacks holdings. The team of professionals supporting the effort to make this century and a half old science FAIR have developed a novel, distributed workflow to ensure that people can engage critically with this material to the fullest extent possible. The project’s workflow is guided by the collections as data imperative conceptual frameworks and is now being referred to as Project PHaEDRA, or Preserving Harvard’s Early Data and Research in Astronomy.

Are Historical Observations “Ancient” or “Modern”?

The demarcation between “old”, “historic” and “heritage” is fuzzy. To a large degree it depends upon purpose and usefulness, and it will always be subjective. At what point does the intrinsic value of an historic item outpace the mystique associated just with its age? When, for instance, does an “old” car become a “vintage” car? When do archived astronomical records contribute something of quantitative value to science? When can they be extricated from the realms of the museum and placed in the context of modern research?Celestial objects vary. Some do so explosively, often irreversibly; many vary periodically over time-scales from a hour or less to a century or more. Furthermore, all celestial objects change as they evolve, mostly so slowly as to be practically imperceptible, but while the general time-scale of that evolution is millions of years there are a few stages (such as the collapse from AGB towards planetary nebula and white dwarf) which happen rather suddenly, and invaluable examples of “before--after” can be found in some plate stores. Astrophysics has a comprehensive need to investigate the nature and time-scales of all types of change, especially ones which only access to its “heritage” data can describe. Surely in this day and age we have enough tools, capacity and technologies to fulfil such a basic requirement?The frustrating answer is that we do have some of the necessary tools, and most of the technologies, but as a community we lack “capacity” if that means manpower and funds. The problem is a technical one of accessing the older data in useable formats; it was generated by the universal change in detector technology from photography to electronic device, an exciting development in efficiency and scope that heralded a new era of research capability and data management, archiving and sharing, but it left pre-digital photographic data right out of the picture. Developments of that nature should have made research more inclusive, instead of the seriously exclusive picture that is currently seen. The longer the situation prevails, the greater the inertia and scepticism to be overcome. Fortunately, some of the challenges are being tackled successfully, the most productive to date being the dasch project (dasch.rc.fas.harvard.edu) at Harvard College Observatory to digitize and share all the images and objective-prism spectra from its collection (the world's biggest) of over 0.5M large plates. The DAO has commenced a programme to digitize its collection of > 16,000 high-dispersion spectra (~70% are good enough to scan and convert), and to scan plates from its larger but older Cassegrain collection of > 90,000 spectra upon request. The instrument for this Herculean task is its own PDS, now suitably upgraded to meet the demands of speed and accuracy; the DAO has also acquired and upgraded a second PDS, with which it plans to share the load. Some smaller observatories in Europe are trying with less sophisticated equipment, but the rest have not the resources to give such data transformation any priority. Despite the unquestionable advantages, it is still necessary to convince colleagues that the medium is not the message, and that the scientific need comes before technological expedience.

A tribute to the life and work of George W. Wetherill: Some reflections of his career at DTM

George Wetherill and I worked together as scientific collaborators when I was a postdoctoral fellow in 1977-1978 at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW) in Washington, D.C. We worked on problems of meteoroids interacting in Earth's atmosphere along with Richard McCrosky at Harvard College Observatory and Zdeněk Ceplecha at the Ondřejov Observatory in Czechoslovakia and also with Sundar Rajan who had already arrived at DTM from the University of California at Berkeley before me.