![]() At times women offered to work at the observatory for free in order to gain experience in a field that was difficult to get into. Fleming herself described the work as "so nearly alike that there will be little to describe outside ordinary routine work of measurement, examination of photographs, and of work involved in the reduction of these observations". The work included such tasks as classifying stars by comparing the photographs to known catalogs and reducing the photographs while accounting for things like atmospheric refraction in order to render the clearest possible image. The women were often tasked with measuring the brightness, position, and color of stars. In describing the dedication and efficiency with which the Harvard Computers, including Florence, undertook this effort, Edward Pickering said, "a loss of one minute in the reduction of each estimate would delay the publication of the entire work by the equivalent of the time of one assistant for two years." They usually earned between 25 and 50 cents per hour (between $7 and $15 in 2022 ), more than a factory worker but less than a clerical one. ![]() Although some of Pickering's female staff were astronomy graduates, their wages were similar to those of unskilled workers. This was relevant in a time when the amount of astronomical data was surpassing the capacity of the Observatories to process it. Among them was that men were paid much more than women, so he could employ more staff with the same budget. Although these women started primarily as calculators, they made significant contributions to astronomy, much of which they published in research articles.Īlthough Pickering believed that gathering data at astronomical observatories was not the most appropriate work, it seems that several factors contributed to his decision to hire women instead of men. Other computers in the team included Williamina Fleming and Florence Cushman. Antonia Maury discerned in the spectra a way to assess the relative sizes of stars, and Henrietta Leavitt showed how the cyclic changes of certain variable stars could serve as distance markers in space. ![]() Annie Jump Cannon's success at this activity made her famous in her own lifetime, and she produced a stellar classification system that is still in use today. The women were challenged to make sense of these patterns by devising a scheme for sorting the stars into categories. The team was directed by Edward Charles Pickering (1877 to 1919) and, following his death in 1919, by Annie Jump Cannon. The Harvard Computers were a team of women working as skilled workers to process astronomical data at the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Team of women who processed astronomical data The Harvard Computers standing in front of Building C at the Harvard College Observatory,
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