2020-03-01_Cosmos_Magazine

Mary Allen and Ethel Wilcocks

measuring astrographic

plates at Sydney Observatory

in 1941. The “computers”

worked in pairs, one reading

measurements off the

micrometer and the other

recording them in a logbook.

1913

CANBERRA FOUNDED

1914

WWI STARTS

1922

CWA FOUNDED (IN NSW)

1922

VEGEMITE FIRST SOLD 1921

EDITH COWAN FIRST

WOMAN ELECTED TO

PARLIAMENT (IN WA)

P

ERCHED AT TWO STURDY TABLES are

four young women working in pairs. One, an

observer, is concentrating deeply, looking

down into a microscope at stars on a fragile glass-

plate negative. The window shines onto a mirror that

reflects light to illuminate the stars on the photograph.

The observer has positioned the glass plate so she

can see a single square of the réseau grid lines. She

turns tiny screws to move the microscope up, down

or across and focusses the eyepiece on a single star-

speck within the grid, making sure the réseau lines

align with a square – made from taut spider-web silk

• visible through the eyepiece.
  Guided by a glass reticle with a graduated X-Y
  axis scale, she reads out the co-ordinates for the
  star’s position to her partner, who writes them down
  in a neatly ruled logbook with a sharpened pencil.
  Then she compares the size of the star with a slide of
  “standard star” brightness dots, which she passes in
  front of the eyepiece using tweezers.
  Around the women are dark timber bookshelves
  filled with logbooks, manuscripts ready for the
  printer, and hundreds of boxes containing thousands
  of photographic glass-plate negatives taken at
  Melbourne Observatory and by their own Sydney
  Observatory astronomers.
  It’s 1948. The observer – Winsome Bellamy


• and her three colleagues have been employed to
  finish the Astrographic Catalogue, which Sydney and
  Melbourne observatories had begun back in 1887. The
  machines they are using were designed in 1904 and
  their methods are the same as used decades earlier.
  When I interviewed Bellamy years later, she
  recalled that she found the work routine: “We
  had turns about to use the machine, because your
  eyes became very tired with looking through the
  micrometer. The other person would sit and write the
  figures down. We did about half an hour, or perhaps

Veiled beneath the Astrographic Catalogue’s canopy of

stars was a corps of female “computers”, who measured and

recorded the stars’ positions – and much more besides.

COLLECTION: MUSEUM OF APPLIED ARTS AND SCIENCES. PHOTOGRAPHER NITSA YIOUPROS.

By TONER STEVENSON

Issue 86 COSMOS – 39

ASTROGRAPHIC CATALOGUE