Dale DeBakcsy
Queen Seondeok and the Construction of East Asia’s First Astronomical Observatory.
It is one of the great stories in the Korean royal tradition. A young princess named Deokman is brought a painting of peonies by her...
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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...
212 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
The Concerns of the Earth, and Above: Mae Jemison’s Life in Medicine and Space Travel.
There is a bit of political wisdom we have lived with for half a century now, which says that spending money on space travel, while...
164 views
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...
187 views
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...
247 views
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
She Filled the Sky: Annie Jump Cannon, Iron Woman of Astronomy.
350,000 stars classified. It's one of astronomy’s unbreakable and frankly not even approachable records, the scientific equivalent of the...
65 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
‘Bordering on the Marvellous’: The Astronomical Menagerie of Williamina Paton Fleming
When William Huggins became the first human to examine the spectrum of a star in 1864, he could little have imagined the magnitude of the...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
One Life for the Sun: Hisako Koyama’s Half Century of Solar Observation.
If anybody embodies the spirit of Helen Sawyer Hogg’s mantra that The Stars Are For Everybody, it is Hisako Koyama (1916–1997), who built...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
Computing Venus: The Trailblazing Path of Maria Mitchell
In the early nineteenth century nothing about the island of Nantucket made sense. It was simultaneously a hotbed of Quakerism and of the...
109 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
Eight Comets, 2500 Nebulae: Caroline Herschel’s Century of Astronomy
In 2092, if there are still humans on our planet to look and to see, a comet will appear in the night sky that has not been viewed since...
137 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
The Secrets Stars Keep: Lady Margaret Huggins, Pioneer of Spectral Photography
The history of science boasts a robust roster of Vanished Women, wives and sisters who did the work of full partners but received the...
86 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
Valentina Tereshkova: The First Woman in Space
‘It is I, Sea Gull!’ The words, full of meaning both personal for the speaker and cultural for the country listening below, were the...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
She Followed the Sun: Ruby Payne-Scott, the World’s First Woman Radio Astronomer
In March of 1944, a physicist and radar specialist named Ruby Payne-Scott aimed her equipment at the sky and became the world’s first...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
Hydrogen Rules the Universe: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin and the Composition of Stars
‘You are young, and wrong. You must retract.’ When fresh-faced zeal confronts experience, it usually loses. Scientists who think they’ve...
22 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 24, 2023
Nancy Grace Roman and the Birth of the Hubble Space Telescope.
It is an image to inspire almost primordial awe, taken when a space telescope with a rocky past pointed itself towards a black expanse of...
108 views
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...
229 views
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