Matt Kilty

Telescope, stars, in lockstep together.

And for 30 minutes, maybe an hour, that faint light would come rushing down the telescope onto this glass plate about the size of a notebook that was covered in this emulsion.

The light would hit the plate and slowly little dots would start to emerge.

Stars, hundreds of them, thousands of them, tiny little individual ones, big clusters of stars, all of them trapped within this glass plate.

Think of it like a photograph of the night sky captured on the glass.

The plate would then be marked with date and time and sent over across the street to this brick building that was full of computers.

These are maybe people you've heard of the Harvard computers.

These are the women who were not allowed to work in the observatory because of the patriarchy.

But they could go to this brick building where they were essentially computing the data, the data of the dots on the plate of the stars.

So their job was to figure out the positions of the stars or if a star was actually a star or just like a speck of something or whatever.

All of this was a part of our most significant attempt at cataloging the heavens.

Now, one of these computers was a woman named Henrietta Leavitt.

Got some fans in the house.

So, Leavitt started at the observatory at the age of 25.

She was a former lit major who her senior year took an astronomy class and was just like,

I think, I have no idea, she didn't write anything about what she experienced in that moment, but whatever it was, it had to be profound, because after that, for 30 cents an hour, she would go to this brick building, sit with about a dozen other women, and using a magnifying glass, she would study plate after plate after plate.

And her job was to mark any star that she saw on these plates that were variable stars.

What's a variable star?

Great question, astute listener.

So variable star is a star that over time varies in brightness.