2020-03-01_Cosmos_Magazine

Issue 86 COSMOS – 105

INSIDE A BUILDING as, old and vast as

the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for

Astrophysics (CfA), you can only imagine

the volume of research hidden away in

boxes.

A marriage of the 1839 Harvard College

and 1890 Smithsonian Astrophysical

observatories, at Harvard University,

the centre is home to a collection of

around 500,000 astronomical glass-plate

photographs. Taken over the century

between the 1880s and 1989, the plates are

accompanied by hundreds of thousands of

hand-written observations by women who

became the project’s Computers.

When Nico Carver and colleagues from

the CfA came across those observations in

2653 notebooks, they set to work digitising

the pages and slides.

“So, we found these notebooks – they

were actually a re-discovery, because

they’d initially been catalogued,” Carver

admits. The notebooks extend all the way

back to very early sketches of Jupiter and

observations done with Harvard’s renowned

Great Refractor telescope – the largest in

North America between 1847 and 1867.

Now, faced with the task of matching

the observations to one of the 500,000 glass

slides, Carver and his team knew they’d

need help, and a lot of it.

Harvard’s librarian for collaborative programs, Nico Carver (above, at right) and assistant community coordinator Sam Correia

hope to identify the mainly anonymous women who logged the heavens in a rediscovered collection of notebooks. The books –

part of the Astrographic catalogue – hold records of star exposures like the plate (opposite) of the Small Magellanic Cloud.

“We realised very early on that we

would need citizen science efforts to do

this, because it’s an incredible amount

of material,” he says. “It’s hundreds of

thousands of pages related to 500,000 glass

plate photographs.

“I think if I was just doing it eight hours

a day, it would take me a lifetime to get

through it!”

Thus, the citizen science project Star

Notes was born. The goal is to link the

notebooks to their original glass-plate

photograph through the unique plate

number.

“This project is a little more fun than

just straight transcription, where you just

have to write down literally everything,”

Carver says. “People need to do a little

hunting on the page, try to find the plate

number and then once you find it, it’s easy

to type it out and move onto the next page.”

All you need to do to participate is

go online, choose an astronomer and get

hunting (see Getting started on Star Notes,

page 107).

The project is important in preserving

the work of early 20th century Harvard

Computers, many of whom made great

strides in both astronomy and gender

equality.

Towards the end of the 19thcentury,

the Harvard College Observatory brought

dozens of women on board to process

astronomical data, paying them much less

than their male counterparts. Like the

“hidden women” of Australian astronomy

(see page 34), their work often involved

measuring the brightness, position and

colour of stars. Then, they would classify

the stars by comparing the photographs to

known catalogues.

The Harvard Computers’ work led to

many discoveries, including the Horsehead

Nebula, as well as the creation of the

Harvard Classification Scheme, which is

still used by astronomers today. While their

work might be known, those who carried it

out aren’t.

“A major impetus of Star Notes is to

better recognise the work of the women... at

“The notebooks

extend back to

very early sketches

of Jupiter and

observations done

with Harvard’s Great

Refractor telescope”

JOHN G. WOLBACH LIBRARY, HARVARD COLLEGE OBSERVATORY

CITIZEN SCIENCEZEITGEIST