![]() ![]() One female philanthropist set up fellowships for women who wanted to work in astronomy at Harvard. Some of the stories I tell in my book are about the women who funded this effort, such as Anna Draper, who donated her fortune to Harvard astronomy, and Catherine Wolfe Bruce, who donated the money to build a telescope to photograph the sky of the Southern Hemisphere. Women played a huge role in making these discoveries possible. What role did women have in deciphering the glass universe? These plates mark the beginning of modern astrophysics. These plates enabled women to create a classification system for the stars and discover new objects. The glass universe is the main character of this story-half a million glass plates on which the Harvard photographs of stars were taken. ![]() We sat down with Sobel to discuss this important time in astronomy and her motivation behind telling this story. Sobel's book details the many accomplishments of these women, including funding new telescopes, inventing new classification systems for stars, and discovering a yardstick for measuring distances across space. ![]() ![]() On April 4, science writer Dava Sobel visited Caltech to give a talk about her recent book, The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars, which details the lives and accomplishments of a group of female astronomers and philanthropists at Harvard in the late 1800s. Technology Transfer & Corporate Partnerships ![]()
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