The Glass Universe: The Hidden History of the Women Who Took the Measure of the Stars

AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR‘A peerless intellectual biography. The Glass Universe shines and twinkles as brightly as the stars themselves’ The Economist#1 New York Times bestselling author Dava Sobel returns with a captivating, little-known true story of women in scienceIn the mid-nineteenth century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or “human computers,” to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night. As photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the women turned to studying images of the stars captured on glass photographic plates, making extraordinary discoveries that attracted worldwide …