1/9/2024 0 Comments Comic life 3 download![]() ![]() Citizen scientists can get involved with Project PHaEDRA from anywhere in the world - all you need is a computer. So, the project relies on thousands of volunteers to help comb through decades of invaluable astronomical observations and turn them into something usable for researchers today. Its goal is to digitize and catalog those decades of work from the Harvard Computers.īut the collection of notebooks is far too extensive for researchers to manage alone. Now Bouquin is leading an initiative known as Project PHaEDRA. “We were shifting from mapping the sky and what we see and trying to describe it, to trying to understand the physics of the sky. “In the late 1800s and early 1900s, astronomy was undergoing a revolution,” Bouquin says. Today that data is foundational to our understanding of the basic structure of the universe. Women like Henrietta Swan Leavitt and Annie Jump Cannon produced some of the first rigorous examinations of the motion and brightness of stars. Like the women memorialized in the movie “Hidden Figures,” the Harvard Computers toiled in relative obscurity, yet they produced groundbreaking work fundamental to the field of astronomy. “So this team of women, over the course of a couple of decades, basically analyzed and created the first all-sky catalog.” History’s ‘Hidden Figures’ “Someone had to go look at every plate covered in thousands of little stars, and they had to look at every star on that plate and catalog it,” says Daina Bouquin, head librarian at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Before the days of silicon and circuits, actual humans performed the laborious mathematical endeavor of physics and astronomy. Though it was Pickering’s idea, the actual work of studying these photographs was done by a group of women known as the Harvard Computers. Today, these photos survive on hundreds of thousands of glass plates at the Harvard College Observatory, the oldest comprehensive record of the cosmos. Or, rather, many thousands of pictures, each capturing a tiny rectangle of the universe as seen through a telescope. More than 100 years ago, Harvard astronomer Edward Charles Pickering decided he was going to take a picture of the entire night sky. (Credit: Harvard College Observatory/Wikimedia Commons) The Harvard Computers spent decades studying the night sky, recording their observations in notebooks and on photographic plates, which citizen scientists are now transcribing. Williamina Fleming (standing) supervised the women “computers” at Harvard College Observatory. ![]()
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