Harvary College Observatory Project
Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2023 12:08 pm
In the last issue of Sky & Telescope there was an article titled "Star Notes" about the OLD notebooks from Harvard women astronomers. They had a link to a crowd-source project to help them sort out the scanned images of all the books. I tried it, and have looked at upwards of 2,000 pages. For this go-around all they are looking for is to mark the pages that contain sketches or drawings, so it goes pretty fast. Thought I would share three of them that caught my eye. One is the charting of Neptune in 1846-1847. One is the tracking Mars in 1877. The other is a very neat page of numbers, but I don't know what they are for. Whenever one of these neat ones popped up on the screen it always caught my eye so I just started writing the dates down. Apparently this female astronomer 'observer' (initials WAR) and her 'recorder' (initials JFM) did this complex stuff from 1872-1879. Just thought that was a bit like honoring and touching the past.