I want to thank the foundation for supporting the initiatives where we do events that are science themed so we have a shout out to the assignments and i want to mention the amateur Astronomers Association in new york will be in the gardens with telescopes and helping to view the skies and the claim is that the clouds will clear write about exactly as we finish the last question and we will have a book signing for the glass universe so we will have a book signing and do qanda after the conversation. He introduced the guests. Im sure a lot of you have heard. I want to introduce the bestselling author and superb author when you spoke about your book longitude you said your son asked for what you are working on and he said nobody is going to read that. A best selling book and most recently galileos daughter is a popular book and marcel acknowledged in the Pulitzer Prize nomination in 2000 so that was quite an honor and then we have the glass universe we are here to talk about tonight which is the story of the women of the College Observatory will be talking about so lets welcome. We also have leah known as an assistant professor of arts and director of the teaching and drawindrawing department at chan university, a wonderful artist and a great synchronicity has worked with the sites written about in this historical book. We are lucky to have them in their different perspectives one is an artist and one as a historian. [applause] i did a terrible thing. I didnt bring my clicker. Sorry we are a little rough around the edges. Can we go back to the first slide for the second . Tonights conversation the glass universe is named because of the hundreds of thousands glass plate the women of the harvard College Observatory used as an innovative technique to study the universe. Many things are interesting about it scientifically which we will talk about but of course obviously sociologically this is before women had the right to vote and i used to tell this story that i have relayed this gaggle of women that worked for Charles Pickering the director of the College Observatory and the story that i heard he was so disgusted with his computers he said my maid could do a better job and allegedly fired the men and hired his scottish made who did a fine job. What is the real story . He already had some Women Computers and a scottish made that have come to work for him on the president s side of the observatory, the pregnant woman no longer with her husband. He immediately realized she was too intelligent to be working as a domestic servant so she moved her to the observatory and gave her work to do then she went on to become the first woman at harvard to have a university title, she was the curator of astronomical photograph. This was around 1879. She had to go home to have to te babies of alist 1881 as the year she started. This picture was taken in 1925 so shes no longer there is a lot of famous folks are in the picture that started in 1896. Annie is seated next to the globe. She became famous for her classification of the stars. You learn will be a fine gro. They were in alphabetical order than the characteristics required juggling the alphabet soup of mnemonic helps people. Then also in the picture is cecelia sitting at the drafting table and she was the first person to earn a phd at harvard. Guest pickering had already died when the program started associates gathering and befriending of wealthy women who paid for the research then they could go out and work somewhere else. Guest i thought it was amazing i had to keep rereading this to make sure that i was understanding it correctly the first phd went to cecelia as you just said. I was struggling with this [inaudible] she was the first female chair of many departments and she goes on to teach in the Astronomy Department and oversees the first male phd candidate and then 40 years later is awarded an astronomy chair. There was a lot of resistance to giving them titles other than computer assistant that was a man could the computer assistant also. Food we have in this slide . Standing in the back overseeing is the woman we talked about first so she supervised the others and she hired a lot of other women. The great expansion of the female staff happened because of the drapers. Anna palmer was planning to do a project with her husband. He died at age 45 and she wanted to see his work completed so being an independently wealthy woman she offered to give the money to carry out the Research Program in exchange for its named after her husband. Lets talk about Charles Pickering himself. Is about 30yearsold and thiin thispicture when he took e observatory. A physicist and that was kind of a scandal over the hiring a physicist. How many years was he there . 42. I was moved by this commission hired a woman in a compromised position as you said to be a made. I think about the idea of him as a feminist in a strange way. I dont think you could hypothesize about women breaking boundaries but if he saw the talent, he accepted it without any hesitation. Guest he was also not only hiring them but encouraging the womens colleges to work on their own and send the results to harvard to prove Higher Education was a value for women. He also encouraged women to publish under their own name so if you were working at the observatory you are part of the bigger picturaBigger Picture ofg on but when discoveries were made he would encourage hi and h different women to be noted in what they were publishing. He responded easily with no weight or social burden but he still had severe limitations. He said things like, and im quoting from durable clear he says women with a knack for figures can be accommodating ann the computer room with a credit to profession pitches a strong thing to say tha but he professs that by saying why it would be unseemly, including youve not had, to subject but not to mention the cold and winter but he says they could be computed. She was the first woman to use a telescope. He saw them as being valuable but he didnt value them equally and that is an important part of the story that im the one hand he is sort of saying this is a great opportunity for you and women. Was a 25 cents per hour they were paid . They were making like 6. 16 per hour so they were not scaling up. Completely in support of the gender pay is fascinating and shes clearly very fond of him but keeps a diary. Edward Charles Pickering fleming. She goes back to scotland to have her baby out of wedlock and names her baby about him. Most of the women in the observatory were devoted to him and some way. They worked in close quarters six days a week and socialized on saturday night. It has to be admitted to some of the work was toilsome. Once we get to the picture with the numbers. There was a good work involved in the tasks that you never get the sense that they are ungrateful or resentful. No, they were well aware that they were involved in groundbreaking research and they felt science was more important than these other luxuries were things we value socially. His attitude was more i thought from reading your history science would benefit from this work and it made no sense to be concerned about anything else. Im going to read this from the diary. He seems to think no work is too much or too hard for me no matter what the responsibility or how long the hour hours thatd be raised the question of salary and im told i received an excellent salary where women stand but i have a home to keeping the family to take care of. But i suppose women have no claims to such comfort and this is considered an enlightened a age. This was written right before women had the right to vote. Whats interesting is this is a Crucial Point we still live just like to see if unequal gender pay. Women have to support their families. Its very deeply rooted. She starts to feel her work must not be of value if she isnt paid equally so i thought that was very strong. Did you read her journals . I was going to the scrapbooks and archives because it was this amazing lineage of history where they are getting all this cred credit. The story flips very quickly when you see that there is this unending source material from all over the world but at the same time when wilhelmina passes away the president of harvard refuses to give her that title and she has no it isnt until the new president that she assumes this. They set up the classification system we still use today but they are writing to or speaking openly the president isnt recognizing this brilliant scientist within so i was really fascinated by annie in the way she visually recruited all of her travels to these observatories. Theres so many pictures of her. Here is an actual class plate. Women typically worked in pairs when would be speaking out observations to the recorder that would write things down. What was so innovative using the glass plate . We think of using emotions and photography. The genius was to create this photographic archive that still exists, all half a million glass plates are in the building that was constructed specifically to hold them and keep them safe from fire. Things used to bring down a lot. By introducing photography and stuff observing through the telescope you could collect a record over a period of hours and then photographs could be taken off with an eye toward overtime and you could study a usrecent address touse of the pe stars change over time. Thats why they need to do so many women to be looking at the plate. What is amazing about this story this is the record we have 100 years ago so although we are looking at archival material that is still relevant imagery because it is the birth of photography itself, some of the first images of the sky but its still relevant. It pays to look back at the record and what was in the sky. It was one of the most important discoveries that came out of this incredible catalog of information. Can you tell me about this actual glass plate . They are the spectrum of all the stars that were captured on the plate and there is a prism in the telescope so you see the light spread out into its component colors but its blackandwhite photographs that you dont see the colors. You just have to know blue is over here and goes all the way over to read. You see the lines that are in the spectra. From the patterns of the lines creating a classification system ciphering the chemical composition of the stars. One of the most interesting discoveries was the abundance. Its a shocking if you look at the composition of the earth. We are the product of stars having sympathized back out into the universe. This was prior to all of that but we know when it was created mostly just hydrogen. This is a deep discover the deet was made and the professional colleagues dismissed it. The heavy elements would be more prevalent and the idea that it consisted of the lightest elements was ridiculous but it took only four years from her paper. For studying the spectra and noticing this evidence of absorbing a particular color so with eliminating a particular cover. Whats interesting is her advisor discouraged her from publishing in a way he said it is probably not the case said in your book where she talks about the abundance of hydrogen and then theres one sentence that isnt the case. She does so with external pressure and thought this is what i observed. What is so interesting is that its such a new subject it wasnt so far out there for an astronomer to make the discovery and speculate at the same time because everything was just being discovered at that time. She was absolutely right and this predates what led to the protection of the big bang. The big bang is proposed but its not in the vernacular of everybodys after people derived from his own series. Its that simple most elementary stuff thats amazing. Can we get the next slide. We will get to these magnificent images. Looking at the images taken from south america because the whole sky had to be covered and there was an observatory built in peru to photograph the Southern Hemisphere and she was looking at images of the clouds and discovered a couple thousand variable stars and made a fundamental discovery about the pattern in the variation that took the longest time to go through the cycles were the brightest. She figured all the stars were roughly the same distance away. That observation led to the first yardstick for measuring what we would call intergalactic distances in space. Her work enabled the size to be determined. It wasnif wasnt the only galae universe but the universe in fact consisted of multiple galaxies. Host they were not sure if the universe was a few hundred thousand lightyears and maybe that was it. This led to us looking at the galaxies and replace ourselves in that geometry. This is a plate of a larger plate and. To hear what shes done is shes overlaid it with a grad. My research we were working on what go out to the harvard class plate archives on the cover of the glass plate so here you can see carefully the curator made a little cheat sheet so this is used as the source materials on the next slide. The imagery but dont reflect what they were looking at the process and final image itself separates them on a translucent piece of paper and then its used. Lets point out we have a little popup that shows the work on the wall that was painted this morning. We will get to how you make the actual physical piece thats here. Thats the one on the wall. Just explained the philosophy of this. What fascinated me about the glass plate itself isnt just the first record of the sky. If you were an astronomer you had to make drawings and then if i say this is a certain luminosity perhaps they have a different interpretation but they were studying the glass plates and rarely what they print them into positive so its a reference to the photographic process. But the image was never photographed so its kind of player and its meaning of the process. Lets see the next slide please. I should also say as an artist with with a lot of leverage and cyan science you can see those are my haitians on the back and its been demolished and is being rebuilt as we speak so theres leah working in the Science Department on a large piece so here you are building what you call this the negative . This is the collaboration. [laughter] who do we have here . Weve lost all of our advocate. Thats mrs. Fleming standing by the cupboard she keeps the glass plates. She was there for a very long time and oversold the women that were working. Did she oversee any of the men or were they two separate groups . The men were operating the telescopes. The women were studying photographs. She identified an enormous amount of objects. She discovered i think hundreds of variable stars and the nebula i think we have a picture of that. She had the most discoveries of the stars of the time. Lets see the next slide please. By identifying different place, the fear he is favorite each tied to one discovery that each of the women mad made so this ie horse head nebula itself it is upside down and if you boo looka contemporary image it looks a little more horselike. This is after wilhelmina flemi fleming. Can i think my friend for finding this for me. Its a glass plate. When you work on then theres always the danger they will break and thats why they are being digitized so science can have access to them. This is the computing room. It amazed me what these women endured because although it was a wonderful opportunity to contribute to sign science, it wasnt the commitment to an easy life of any kind of physical comfort. They suffered all kinds of illnesses and they worked absurd hours. What did you think about uncovering those details . They had the same sort of illnesses we have. They work normal hours but anybody that is really involved in research knows you dont stop just because it is five or 6 00. They were very committed. What they gave up at the beginning was any kind of a home life. There is a working mother. Most of the times of the women wanted to get married that was the end of their career. There is a line someone says something to that effect its no longer the end of your career if you get married. The other thing youre saying about these long hours they are given the task and a lot of ways it is just mind numbing labeling stores looking at the spectrum but then they are not enough time to make their own conclusion. She discovered the variables and gives us the yardstick to measure the yardstick to measure the universe but then she doesnt have to jump to this in place later in the talk to take over as the discoverer. The slide before this when she is hired she is unique and hired not only as a computer got to work the telescope at night and its writing about how heavy the telescope is. Im not so sure. I admired in the book you didnt try to impose you just take it as it is. In the moments of clarity in the journal has so much impact because you havent colored alcohol were diluted the impact so that when it comes it is really powerful. Shes the only one at a table of men and writes a journal since i have done most of the work on the subject i had to do most of the talking. Im not afraid of work. I long for it. Theres this idea of recognition versus participation. In the beginning of the observatory. They were willing to basically work for free. They just wanted to work and contribute it. She discovered a comment in 1847. When he started the college he hired her and talked some of thf the women came to work at harvard. Many people think shes an unsung genius, just a true extraordinary. She did computing work. Interesting. She was very admired. These are also students at wellesley. She was working in a physics lab that had been modeled on at mit. The teacher thats why her education equipped her to be the first woman at the observatory to use the telescope. Is important since it was a numbeis thenumber of times to ae the impact. He thought very highly and there was a lot of aggression against them and he would say all you have to do is look at what these women are producing. To add the context of time and what was going on at this point when he is hiring the computers its still 40 years before they get the right to vote and that is just mind blowing theres a roothere is aroom of 20 women de physics, incredible. Id like to see the book that tells how we went from there to where we were in the 70s and 80s. Next slide please. This is the observatory. And the next slide. That is a later stage on the side of the volcano they thought was extinct. It was a wonderful endowment he was able to secure. How problematic this event . Is lost to the weather after a certain number of years. It was because of a donation from a separate female donor so that was a totally bizarre part of the observatory. Catherinkatherine brooks paid fe telescope. He said he needed 50,000 she came forward and wrote him a check. He also spent some of his own and often offered money back to the observatory. They are there and start at the place and i think your next picture is a cluster. She became very interested in the clusters of stars as a technical term. He noticed they were full of variables so in the closeup picture when they got close to the center it was impossible but then they were also looking at pictures of the same over time. They didnt know where the clusters are and now we know that there are some in our galaxy and to some and others as well but the ones we are looking at here or in our code and the collection of stars that orbit. They are not as down to the plane but how would you know looking at this but it is in your own or incredibly far away. You cant tell by that somehow would you tell them this wasnt what i guess you were mentioning she gave us a way to gauge the distance. I decided to throw this in taken by the Hubble Space Telescope so we do a little better now. You can see the tremendous detail. The satellite was launched several decades later and its extraordinarily short of scaled launching an object into space. They started giving their study but its the definition of the galaxy and what that can possibly be. Tell me about this. They are undergoing a process to scan the glass plates for this beautiful calligraphy where theres Different Things from numbering systems and then they are scraping the plates and photographing them. Do you have somebody breathing down your neck later . You dont touch the plate you can see all of this leaves for the most part or original and thats why you see some of them have beautiful writing and conversations and different women writing back and forth. This is digging into the process. This is based on one of the nebula i found in the plate and painted upstairs on the third floor and printed with one of my studios. Can we see the next slide while you talk. We are dealing art everyone. This is mixing the chemistry. We take the studio and turn it into a darkroom blocking everything out and mixing the photo emulsion and coating it on largescale watercolor paper. We turned on the way for the sake of the photographs. We turned it into a darkroom and then the negative is pressed between the painting on a watercolor piece of paper and then its exposed out in the sun. So then you get these emotions. You go through a lot of different recipes its not like you mix it and youre done. How do you decide when you need the right recipe . The first i think we were printing every friday for three months before we got the first print. The first Exposure Time of the window is very small and changes throughout the day. You declare the final. Its a photographic print i cant make another one by using the negative. The painting has a lot of activity. If you think about more of the process as opposed to the final product. I was meeting an astronomer. Sure enough theres a physicist at harvard now thats an incredible lineage. Everyone knows there are women there but don that dont undere full impact. They always thought that it was somethinsome kind of a cute stod they didnt realize they were doing science. I didnt know that story until t was brought to my attention. I had heard of pickering town and i have this vision that is amusing but it wasnt until this work i became interested and started to learn more i didnt know about it so thats interesting the idea of education and why cant we be educated in parallel to have the Bigger Picture at all times. I also think it is interesting i found other scientists at harvard had the same reaction you did that knew it was there but didnt know what it was which is astounding. We had this amazing lineage that takes up three stories. When i was a graduate student i saw all these pictures and they didnt even register a. Im sure its been up there since i was in graduate school. Its funny that i didnt even notice in the buildings and find almost every day for years to. It was out for a posed photograph like a picture of a. Next slide, please. We talk about that in the context of the photograph. I was looking at the handwriting. In a lot of ways i restricted to the plates different people were using that i was interested in any kind of physical imaging in different libraries and notebooks and journals and christmas cards. But then in the records you can see these endless notetaking was with their initials and i think the link to the lineage is powerful to see the visual replication of all this writing and in addition to the glass plates this extensive card catalogs that map the entire s sky. It was an incredible undertaking not just the glass plates that they were mapping the entire sky is. He dies prematurely ended his wife that funds the computers at the observatory. My friend that is hiding in the audience an there is a class plate but we think that it was taken by the nearest spiral galaxy but again im not sure exactly of the year this plate but we dont know the time they were collections of hundreds of billions bu that were some mills of lightyears away in the entire other universes that would have been called that. This is the difference of the obscurity of the women and the acclaim. This is early 1920s. He was working at mount wilson with some of the most powerful telescopes at the time and was in pursuit of the nebula. I love this image that was taken and is dated october, 1923 and it is a dramatic moment. Most of the stars that you are seeing in this picture they were identified as part of this nebula then realized i but thens a variable star. He was able to do with this defe but that is far outside the milky way. He expands the universe from a few hundred thousand light years suddenly to millions and now we know its 97 billion its full of the assumption that its also the relevance of the glass pla plate. This is the moment of the huge discovery and not only that but the universe is expanding. I also think it circles that this idea where they are able to create the data or the information so the observatory gets a letter to. If you wrote that basically if given the time, she would have possibly come to her own conclusion. They had a mathematical law so she did this tremendous analysis and yet she would have gone on to know how to leverage it. It was known as the period luminosity regulation. Its not my favorite photograph for this is the Hubble Space Telescope. Its a watercolor. Several times bigger than ours but one they will merge. On a closing slide is there anything that weve missed . The first one to come to the observatory and then have a fellowship named for maria mitchell. She was the director for 40 years. Is annie your favorite