Dale DeBakcsy
Maria Winkelmann and the Guilded Age of Astronomy
Back in the age when historians favored hard and fast lines between different Eras of world history, 1543 stood as the gold standard...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 25, 2023
Champion of Chinese Heliocentrism: The Stellar Mathematics of Wang Zhenyi
An arrow hits a target as a fifteen year old girl on a horse goes galloping victoriously by. It is not an entirely unusual sight in late...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 25, 2023
Summing the Cosmos: Henrietta Swan Leavitt and the Saga of the Cepheid Stars
Astronomy is the sifting science. Its practitioners rake the sky, star by star, collecting and cataloguing, and when they are done, they...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
Kepler, For the People: Maria Cunitz’s Urania Propitia and the Popularisation of Heliocentrism.
When Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) rewrote our conception of how heavenly bodies move by replacing the ideal and eternal circles of...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
Before There was Sagan: How Helen Sawyer Hogg Brought Astronomy to the People
Before, ‘The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, all there ever will be,’ there was, ‘The stars belong to everyone,’ the...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
Jane Luu and the Discovery of the Kuiper Belt.
For a half century after the discovery of Pluto in 1930, the common wisdom was that it was the last, furthest member of our solar system,...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
Studies in Expectation: Jocelyn Bell-Burnell and the Discovery of Pulsars.
Sometimes the hardest thing about living in the universe is knowing about it. There is real and true terror to be faced in the...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
‘The Somewhat Nerve-Wearing Experience’: Sarah Frances Whiting Rewrites Women’s Science Education
In the 1860s and 1870s, women’s access to advanced astronomical instruction in the United States took a sudden and majestic turn for the...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
Making Spectroscopy Hip: Agnes Mary Clerke at the Nerve Centre of 19th Century Astrophysics
For a solid century and a half, from Mary Somerville’s The Mechanism of the Heavens of 1830 to Helen Sawyer Hogg’s final With the Stars...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
Margaret Burbridge and the Dawn of Nucleosynthesis Theory
If you had asked a random astronomer in the 1930s how all of the elements in the universe were produced, they would have had a ready and...
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