The Glass Universe: The Hidden History of the Women Who Took the Measure of the Stars. Дава Собел
no high-altitude astronomical observatory yet existed in the United States, the federal reservation at Pikes Peak was home to the world’s highest meteorology station, maintained at 14,000 feet by the U.S. Army Signal Corps. This made Pikes Peak the only American mountain where particulars of weather (beyond the statistic of annual rainfall) were known. When Pickering’s party of five men ascended in August, leading mules laden with scientific instruments, they encountered a snow squall, a hailstorm, and a thunderstorm they described as violent. Over the course of the month, they camped and compared conditions on three peaks in the region by various means, such as a sunshine recorder William had modified as a complement to a rain gauge, and also by photographing the sky through a 12-inch telescope. Conditions did not seem optimal. What was worse, rumor had it that Pikes Peak might be turned into a state tourist attraction, and be overrun with non-astronomers.
Pickering returned to Cambridge without having settled the placement of the Boyden Station. He thought he might revisit the Rockies the following summer, or try a different mountain range.
In October, after Mrs. Draper returned East, closed her Dobbs Ferry house for the season, and reestablished herself on Madison Avenue, she thanked Pickering for the summer’s adventure with the gift of an ornamental pocket telescope that had once belonged to King Ludwig of Bavaria.
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WITH TWO AND OFTEN THREE TELESCOPES taking pictures through the night, the observatory devoured plates at a rapid rate. Between 1886 and 1887, advances in the quality of manufactured dry plates extended their recording range to fainter stellar magnitudes, and Pickering took full advantage of each new development. He tried different companies’ wares and shifted suppliers accordingly; he encouraged manufacturers to keep improving the sensitivity of their plates—and to send him their latest products for testing.
The volume of data to be calculated rose in proportion to the number of photographs taken. Anna Winlock’s younger sister, Louisa, assumed her place in the computing room in 1886, and was joined the following year by Misses Annie Masters, Jennie Rugg, Nellie Storin, and Louisa Wells. The staff of female computers now numbered fourteen, including Mrs. Fleming, who served as their supervisor. Most of the ladies were younger than she, more or less her social equals, and respectful of her authority. That situation shifted in 1888 with the addition of twenty-two-year-old Antonia Maury, who was not only a Vassar College graduate with honors in physics, astronomy, and philosophy, but also the niece of Henry Draper.
“The girl has unusual ability in a scientific direction,” Mrs. Draper told Pickering on March 11, 1888, “and is anxious to teach chemistry or physics—and is studying with that object in view.”
As a child, Antonia Maury was allowed into her Uncle Henry’s chemistry laboratory at the big house in New York City, where she “assisted” him by handing him specific test tubes he requested for his experiments. Before she turned ten, her father, the Reverend Doctor Mytton Maury, an itinerant Episcopal minister, taught her to read Virgil in the original Latin. Her mother, Henry Draper’s sister Virginia, was a naturalist enamored of every bird, flower, shrub, and tree on the Hastings property; she had died in 1885 while Antonia was studying at Vassar.
Pickering felt uncomfortable offering the standard computer pay of twenty-five cents per hour to a person of Miss Maury’s achievements. He expressed something like relief when she failed to answer his letter, but Mrs. Draper interceded for her through April and May.
“The girl has been very busy,” the aunt explained. Although Reverend Maury had relocated to Waltham, Massachusetts, for his work, he had neither found a home for his family nor enrolled his two younger children, Draper and Carlotta, in school, leaving Antonia to take charge of these matters. By mid-June she had joined the Harvard corps.
Pickering assigned Miss Maury the spectral measurement of the brightest stars. Mrs. Fleming had worked from plates containing hundreds of spectra crowded together, and on which the bright stars appeared overexposed. The 11-inch Draper telescope focused on just one star at a time. Each spectrum imaged in this manner spread over an expanse of at least four inches, even before enlarging. The gratifying increase in detail gave Miss Maury much to ponder as she examined the plates under a microscope. In the same blue-violet region of Vega’s spectrum where her uncle had photographed four lines in 1879—and ten in 1882—she now counted more than one hundred.
Along with measuring the distances between the lines and converting them to wavelengths, she was expected to classify each spectrum according to Mrs. Fleming’s criteria. But Miss Maury had so much more detail to work with that she could not confine her impressions to those parameters. Some of the lines she looked at were not simply thick or intense, but also hazy or fluted or otherwise noteworthy. Such nuances surely deserved attention, for they might illustrate as yet unsuspected conditions in the stars.
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WHEN HARVARD’S SECOND MOUNTAIN reconnaissance headed West in November 1888, Pickering opted out. He could not possibly afford enough time away from the observatory to fulfill the mission’s ambitious itinerary, which was to begin site testing near Pasadena, California, and continue among the Andes in Chile and Peru. He put his brother, William, in charge. While in California, the team would also visit the Sacramento Valley to observe and photograph the total solar eclipse of January 1, 1889.
Ordinarily, Pickering did not support eclipse expeditions, on practical grounds. He deemed the expense too high, given the high risk of failure. An ill-placed cloud during the scant moments of totality could scotch the whole enterprise (as he had learned firsthand when he went to Spain with former director Winlock for the eclipse of December 22, 1870). But if, as in the present case, the path of totality nearly crossed the path of exploration for the new Boyden Station, Pickering would not object to a small detour.
Favorable weather smiled on the observers for the New Year’s Day eclipse. Excitement at the rare sight, however, shook the astronomers and the large crowd of onlookers alike. At the start of totality, the spectators started to yell. The noise drowned out William’s call to the person counting out the seconds, and his struggle to make himself heard caused him to take fewer pictures than he intended. He also forgot to remove the lens cap from the spectroscope.
From his disappointment in Sacramento, William went south to Mount Wilson, where he and a few assistants were to test atmospheric conditions by observing for several months with a 13-inch telescope they brought along for that purpose. At the same time, the other half of the team departed for South America. In Pickering’s grand scheme, two mountain observatories were better than one. A California aerie would improve on the work done at Cambridge, while an additional satellite station in the Southern Hemisphere would widen Harvard’s field of view to encompass the entire sky.
Pickering entrusted control of the South America venture to Solon I. Bailey, age thirty-four, who had joined the observatory staff as an unpaid assistant two years earlier and quickly proven himself deserving of a salary. Like Pickering, Bailey had a younger brother with a talent for photography, and so, with Pickering’s blessing, Solon appointed Marshall Bailey as his second-in-command, and planned to meet him in Panama after the eclipse. Facing a trip expected to last two full years, Solon took along his wife, Ruth, and their three-year-old son, Irving.
The February 1889 voyage aboard the San Jose of the Pacific Mail gave Bailey occasion to practice his Spanish with several fellow passengers, whose names he recorded in his journal. On deck, he enjoyed watching Venus sink into the sea after sunset, “plainly seen till she touched the water.” In the predawn February sky, he sighted the Southern Cross for the first time. Bailey had loved the stars since his boyhood in New Hampshire, where he witnessed the great natural fireworks of the 1866 Leonid meteor shower. Now he would meet a sky’s worth of new constellations, which prospect inured him to whatever hardships lay ahead.
The bulk of the Andes expedition supplies—everything from photographic plates to prefabricated buildings—traveled with Marshall from New York to the Isthmus of Panama, then overland, past the recently aborted French canal effort and the graveyards of fever victims to another ship bound for Callao, near Lima.
The party rode the Oroya Railroad twenty miles east from Lima to Chosica, and from