Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 02-Aug-2024 03:12:46 JST Robert McNees

   Astronomer Helen Sawyer Hogg was born #OTD in 1905. She was an authority on variable stars and globular clusters, and a pioneer of communicating science to the public.

   Image: University of Toronto, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics

   • Embed this notice
     Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 02-Aug-2024 03:12:45 JST Robert McNees

     in reply to

     Second, astronomer Annie Jump Cannon visited Mount Holyoke the following year, and made a big impression on Sawyer.

     After graduating, Sawyer moved to Harvard to work with Cannon and Harlow Shapley on globular clusters. Radcliffe awarded her PhD (1931), because Harvard didn't award science graduate degrees to women.

     https://mastodon.social/@mcnees/109496538128937972

   • Embed this notice
     Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 02-Aug-2024 03:12:45 JST Robert McNees

     in reply to

     Helen Sawyer’s husband got a job at an observatory in Victoria, BC. Officially, she worked there as his "volunteer assistant."

     It was there that she began her work on variable stars in clusters. The detailed catalogs that she started compiling during this period (and first published in 1939) are still in use today.

     https://www.astro.utoronto.ca/~cclement/readhistory.html

   • Embed this notice
     Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 02-Aug-2024 03:12:45 JST Robert McNees

     in reply to

     The couple moved to Toronto in 1934, where she got a job at Dunlap Observatory. Later, she became a professor at the University of Toronto.

     Helen Sawyer Hogg was an NSF astronomy program director, the first woman to serve as president of the Royal Society of Canada physical sciences section, and was also the founding president of the Canadian Astronomical Society:
     http://casca.ca/?page_id=53

     Mr. Bill repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 02-Aug-2024 03:12:45 JST Robert McNees

     in reply to

     Somehow, while doing all this, Helen Sawyer found time to be a sci-comm pioneer, reaching out to large audiences through newspaper, books, and TV.

     She wrote a column called "With the Stars" for the Toronto Star from 1951-1981, and a column about the history of astronomy, called "Out of Old Books," for the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada from 1946-1965.

   • Embed this notice
     Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 02-Aug-2024 03:12:46 JST Robert McNees

     in reply to

     Helen Sawyer studied chemistry at Mount Holyoke, but two things made her switch to astronomy. First, as part of a class with Dr Anne Sewell, she viewed the total solar eclipse of 1925.

     "The almost incredible beauty and grandeur of a total eclipse, tied me to astronomy for life."

     Imo, every awestruck kid looking up at the sky during a total eclipse is a new astronomer being born. Here’s mine, back in 2017, at Manhattan Project National Park in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.