you know you’ve been waiting quite a long time
at the secretary of state’s office
when even a minivan load of nuns get restless.
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“I sometimes think I was born to live up to my name.
how could I be anything else but what I am having been named madonna?
i would have either ended up a nun or this.”
-madonna ciccone
Astronomy Nuns
Sisters Emilia Ponzoni, Regina Colombo, Concetta Finardi and Luigia Panceri mapped the positions and brightness of 481,215 stars.
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These Little-Known Nuns Helped Map the Stars.
A century later, the identities of women who mapped over 481,000 stars are finally known.
The history of astronomy is riddled with underappreciated women who looked to the stars long before their scientific contributions were recognized. But the constellation of early women astronomers is glowing brighter, writes Carol Glatz for Catholic News Service, with the recognition of four once nameless nuns who helped map and catalog half a million stars in the early 20th century.
Glatz reports that the nuns, Sisters Emilia Ponzoni, Regina Colombo, Concetta Finardi and Luigia Panceri, were recruited by the Vatican to measure and map stars from plate-glass photographs. They cataloged the brightness and locations of a whopping 481,215 stars during their years of diligent work. Photos of the nuns had appeared in books about the history of astronomy, but the identity of the women was not known—and their accomplishments not recognized—until now.
Their years of labor were finally acknowledged when Father Sabino Maffeo, a Jesuit priest who works at the Vatican Observatory, found their names while organizing papers for the archives. Today, the project to which the nuns contributed is as obscure as the nuns themselves, but at the time it was one of the largest scientific undertakings in history.
In April 1887, 56 scientists from 19 countries met in Paris to embrace a new discipline: astrophotography. Their plan was a bold one—use 22,000 photographic plates to map the entire sky. The work was split up among institutions across Europe and the United States, including the Vatican Observatory. Each institution was given a particular zone of the sky to map and categorize.
At the time, male astronomers often relied on women to serve as their “computers.” The men would direct the project, but behind the scenes, women did the labor-intensive processing, cataloging and calculating for low wages. Famously, Harvard Observatory director Edward Charles Pickering hired “Pickering’s Harem,” a group of bright young women, to do his share of the star cataloging. Also known as “the Harvard Computers,” these women, formidable astronomical minds in their own right, were only recently acknowledged for their contribution to science.
And what a contribution—the project resulted in he Astrographic Catalogue, a 254-volume catalog of 4.6 million stars. The star atlas called the Carte du Ciel was only halfway finished by the time astronomers stopped working on it in 1962. Though the atlas project was destined to fail, the catalog became the basis of a system of star references that is still used today.
Though the women didn’t end up counting all of the stars, perhaps one day history will do a better job of counting the women whose diligent work helped map out the starry skies.
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credits: smithsonianmag.com, flikr
one of my favorite christmas eve memories, was when my aunt, a catholic nun, mother superior of her order, came to town for the holidays. she came over early, to chat and hang out at my place. the rest of the family was running late, so for some reason, my daughters and i decided to keep her busy by playing a holiday game of ‘quarter bounce.’ open-minded, liberal nun that she is, she asked the rules and played right along with us. she actually did quite well, and we secretly wondered if she might have played once or twice before.
later, when the whole family arrived, we decided to play ‘would you rather?.’ imagine our joy and endless laughter, (including hers), when the card she drew asked, ‘would you rather – a) have no breasts but saucer-sized nipples -or- b) huge breasts and no nipples? could there have been anyone better in the family to have drawn that card?! sometimes the universe just lines up perfectly and offers you an unexpected and joyous gift. she chose the huge breasts option, by the way.
Life must be lived as play. – Plato
i am fascinated, time and again, by my garbagemen. they’ve taken on the role of old-school catholic nuns – strict with their rules, calling me out in front of everyone, and trying to teach me using a tough love approach, though they use ink rather than chalk as their medium of choice, and rap my knuckles with pens rather than wooden rulers.
i am always amazed, that for some reason, there are times when they see fit to stop on their route and write me a note, leaving sticky notes on top of my bins. these notes tell me what i’ve done wrong: bins too close together, wrong item in the wrong bin, green bin to the left of the blue bin, trash not in alphabetical order, and god knows what else, a myriad of my garbage sins.
i find it hilarious that they will take the time to stop and write me these notes rather than just moving a bin over 8.5 inches if need be, taking the trash, and going on with their day. no, instead, they leave it full and with a note atop, promising to be back the next week at the appointed hour to attempt to pick it up again, when my mistake has been corrected. i imagine, at that point they figure i will have done my penance and they will have forgiven me my sins and they are willing and able help me to dispose of my trash, so that i can start anew with a clean slate once again. these guys are all forgiving and have no limit to trying to teach me to do better, and i plan to give them a lovely pen set for christmas this year.
I lived through the garbage. I might as well dine on the caviar . Beverly Sills
I didn't have my glasses on.... 