Women’s History Month
Astronomy’s Unsung Hero: Henrietta Leavitt, Star Gazer
She unraveled the vastness of the universe.
The sun has one kind of splendor, the moon another and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendor. — 1 Corinthians 15:41, NIV
When I was a little girl, stars fascinated me. Gazing into the night sky, I wondered how I might travel among them. My limited knowledge told me it was impossible given the distance between each star.
But how did I know about the great distances between stars? Thanks to the calculations of one little-known unsung hero of astronomy–Henrietta Leavitt, the woman who measured the universe.
Henrietta’s Star Task
In the early 1900s, at the Harvard College Observatory, Henrietta’s job was to count and catalog the star images captured on glass plates for observatories around the world. It was a task she loved dearly.
However, this task was tedious and boring. No men wanted the job, so the Observatory employed women at 30 cents an hour. They did their work so well, that they were called Harvard’s computers.
Henrietta had the ability to note subtle differences in the brightness of the images when she compared the glass…
