June 18, 1896
Arrived in Cambridge! I’ve become so used to New York that Boston seems small and quaint, though its academic air is unrivaled. I’ve been here less than a day and have already heard a number of academic complaints, chief among them grumbling about the city’s lack of interest in implementing Dr. Pickering’s lamp screens, which would prevent light from polluting the skies. Hopefully I have not arrived in Cambridge only to have it become too difficult to see the stars.
I’ve taken a room in a boardinghouse filled with several other women who work at the observatory, and today I met my new colleagues. The group is run by Mrs. Fleming, a no-nonsense Scottish woman who has been here for over a decade. She began her career as the Pickerings’ housemaid, a job she took after being abandoned, while enceinte, by her husband. Mrs. Pickering noticed her talent and recommended her to Dr. Pickering, who brought her to work as a computer. Mrs. Fleming spoke at the Chicago World’s Fair when I was a sophomore, about hiring female assistants in astronomy, and she discovered the Horsehead Nebula in Orion’s Belt. (Though she rarely gets credited.) She’s also published acatalogue of the stars based on the photos the Drapers donated (Dr. Pickering gets credited there).
Most of the other women are older than me. There are a few graduates from the women’s colleges, the youngest six years my senior, Miss Henrietta Swan Leavitt. She will turn 28 on the Fourth of July, which is festive. She is very musical, and studied at Oberlin Conservatory before coming to Cambridge, though she is losing her hearing slowly. Still, she loves to sing. She is a quiet, gentle soul, which I appreciate, though I do love a rowdy one as well.
There is also Miss Annie Jump Cannon, 32, from Wellesley. She is deaf, and strikes me as a little sad—one of the other girls told me her mother died two years ago. Before starting as Dr. Pickering’s assistant this year, she taught physics at Wellesley, and already knows how to handle the telescopes, of which I admit I am jealous. (Mostly only the men are allowed to handle to telescopes.) I like her immensely. I feel very lucky to be assisting her at work: she is classifying the spectra of the brightest stars in the southern section of the photographed sky.
The group of computers makes about forty, half men and half women. I am loath to report such facts to Mama in case she suggests I marry one of them, but at least if I did, there would be intelligent conversation to be had in my marriage.
January 17, 1897
Miss Maury’s work, the “Spectra of Bright Stars,” on the northern stars, was published in the Observatory’s Annals, and forthe first time a woman’s name was ABOVE any of the men! It is so exciting, I fear I might burst into tears. Sometimes it feels like we work so hard for so little credit, and for once, we have gotten it.
Andrea wrote about using a magnifying glass to study glass plates and call out measurements, and her life, playing board games and drinking hot cocoa with friends. She documented the people she met, and the obstacles she faced (often her mother and sister). She wrote about the gardens maintained by Pickering’s wife and the gatherings of astronomers held in the Pickerings’ mansion. In 1898, Andrea—along with the whole astronomical community—was fascinated by the discovery of a comet. (Comets: So hot at the turn of the twentieth century.) Two separate astronomers noticed it when developing their photography plates, but since Gustav Witt of Berlin filed before Auguste Charlois of Nice, it became known as Witt’s planet.I feel some sympathy for Charlois,Andrea wrote in August.How must it feel to independently discover something, to feel such a rush, only to have someone else win the credit?
November 4, 1898
A new discovery—Witt’s planet first came close to Earth four years ago and no one even noticed! Chandler calculated the orbit, and now of course he wants glass plates from us to corroborate his theory.
How MADDENING we had proof of a comet and we didn’teven know! It’s enough to make me want to go through all our plates and see if we have missed any.
November 12, 1898
Witt’s planet is returning in 1900–01. Almost too excited to write such news! This means we’ll be able to measure the distance between the earth and the sun. Of course Halley closed it down to 90 to 100 million miles in the 1700s, but now we’ll be able to get a more exact measurement. It’s to be a huge undertaking of the international astronomical community—observatories in Africa, Europe, and the Americas will be involved. We’re the only one in the United States.
With this knowledge, we’ll triangulate the distance between Earth and the sun and find the solar parallax. What an undertaking. What a discovery.
She wrote about how in 1899, forty-two-year-old Mrs. Fleming finally received a title from Harvard: Curator of Astronomical Photographs. She wrote of Pickering discovering a new moon orbiting Saturn and of traveling to Georgia in 1900 to see a total solar eclipse (it sounded like a party). In 1901, she celebrated the publication of Annie Cannon’s new classification system (and mentioned, briefly, the assassination of the president; his vice president, who Andrea liked for distributing ice chips during a horrible heat wave, was sworn in—Teddy Roosevelt).
Every summer she visited her parents and her sister’s growing brood on Nantucket. I knew from the first time I’d come acrossher name in the newspaper clipping that in 1906, Andrea Darrel and Annie Cannon would teach astronomy classes on the island. This batch of diaries didn’t make it there; they ended in 1903. After I’d read the last entry, I finally fell asleep.
In the morning, it took me a moment to recover from dreams of blazing comets and telescopes and women traipsing across Boston in long dresses. Then yesterday came back: the dunk tank and fireworks andnotkissing Ethan Barbanel but coming home instead.
The sky outside showed a perfect square of blue, so I rolled out of bed and resolved to act like normal, as though I couldn’t care less how Ethan’s night had gone with pigtailed Kylie. Still, a devilish part of me decided it was time to try out a scandalously cut white bikini I’d brought, which should be perfect against my new golden tan.
I knocked on Ethan’s door. “Good morning!” I chirped when he answered, then winced, because I never chirped.
Ethan grinned, a slow unrolling of a smile, his towel already slung over his shoulder. “Morning.”
Don’t ask him about last night, I told myself as we left the house. I was far too proud to let on how bothered I was by the idea of him hooking up with someone else. “I’ve been reading these old diaries about a woman from Nantucket,” I said. “They triangulated the distance between the sun and the earth, did you know that? I didn’t really realize how much science people did a hundred years ago. Or how many women were involved.”
“That’s cool,” Ethan said. “This is for your job?”
“Kind of. I’m also curious now. And, I don’t know—you’re doinga speech on the Gibson comet guy, right? I feel like she might have potential for something like that. How’s the speech going, by the way? You said it’s about his non-comet stuff? What’d he do?”
We picked our way through the gardens, passing tall pines speckled with sunlight, roses and junipers, their perfume thick in the air. It was the kind of summer day out of a dream, the sun hot on our skin, air moist. “Your dad has a chapter on this guy, Nicholas Heck, right?” Ethan said. “He was a geophysicist for the US Coast Survey, and he perfected wire-dragging, which Gibson helped him on a bit.”
“Wire-dragging?”
“It mapped rocks and wrecks beneath the ocean’s surface—to make sure your own boat didn’t crash into them. They’d string a wire between two ships and weigh it down to a certain depth, and when the wire encountered an obstruction, they could use the wires to map its location.” He grinned at me. “More triangulation. Anyway, Gibson did some wire-dragging here on local shipwrecks, along with some other hydrography work for the Coast Survey.”
We reached the staircase to the beach, falling silent as we descended, the wind whipping away any words we attempted. On the beach, I let my cover-up fall off my shoulders and puddle at my feet. I glanced over and saw Ethan’s eyes widen as he took in the white bikini.
“New bathing suit?” he asked casually.
“Like it?”
