Florence Cushman | |
|---|---|
 Cushman in May 1913 | |
| Born | January 30, 1860 Boston, Massachusetts, US |
| Died | January 30, 1940 (Aged 80) Belmont, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Burial place | Mount Auburn Cemetery |
| Education | Charlestown High School, 1877 |
| Employer | Harvard College Observatory |
| Known for | Cushman was one of the "Harvard Computers" |
Florence Cushman (1860-1940) was an American astronomer specializing in stellar classification at the Harvard College Observatory who worked on the Henry Draper Catalogue.
Florence was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 3rd, 1860 and received her early education at Charlestown High School, where she graduated in 1877. In 1888, she began work at the Harvard College Observatory as an employee of Edward Pickering, observing and classifying stars. Florence was one of the “Harvard Computers” [1] who worked under Pickering and, following his death in 1919, Annie Jump Cannon. [2] Her classifications of stellar spectra contributed to Henry Draper Catalogue between 1918 and 1934. [3] She stayed as an astronomer at the Observatory until 1937 and died January 30, 1940, at the age of 80. [4]
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Florence Cushman worked and was a member of the Harvard College Observatory from 1888 to 1937. [5] Over the course of her forty-nine years at Harvard, she employed the objective prism method to analyze, classify, and catalog the optical spectra of hundreds of thousands of stars. In the 19th century, the photographic revolution enabled more detailed analysis of the night sky than had been possible with solely eye-based observations. In order to obtain optical spectra for measurement, male astronomers at the Observatory worked at night, exposing glass photographic plates to capture the astronomical images.
During the daytime, female assistants like Florence analyzed the resultant spectra by reducing values, computing magnitudes, and cataloging their findings. [6] [7] She is credited with determining the positions and magnitudes of the stars listed in the 1918 edition of the Henry Draper Catalogue, [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] which featured the spectra of roughly 222,000 stars. In describing the dedication and efficiency with which the Harvard Computers, including Florence, undertook this effort, Edward Pickering said, "a loss of one minute in the reduction of each estimate would delay the publication of the entire work by the equivalent of the time of one assistant for two years." [17]
In astronomy, stellar classification is the classification of stars based on their spectral characteristics. Electromagnetic radiation from the star is analyzed by splitting it with a prism or diffraction grating into a spectrum exhibiting the rainbow of colors interspersed with spectral lines. Each line indicates a particular chemical element or molecule, with the line strength indicating the abundance of that element. The strengths of the different spectral lines vary mainly due to the temperature of the photosphere, although in some cases there are true abundance differences. The spectral class of a star is a short code primarily summarizing the ionization state, giving an objective measure of the photosphere's temperature.
Albireo is a double star designated Beta Cygni. The International Astronomical Union uses the name "Albireo" specifically for the brightest star in the system. Although designated 'beta', it is fainter than Gamma Cygni, Delta Cygni, and Epsilon Cygni and is the fifth-brightest point of light in the constellation of Cygnus. Appearing to the naked eye to be a single star of magnitude 3, viewing through even a low-magnification telescope resolves it into its two components. The brighter yellow star, itself a very close binary system, makes a striking colour contrast with its fainter blue companion.
The Henry Draper Catalogue (HD) is an astronomical star catalogue published between 1918 and 1924, giving spectroscopic classifications for 225,300 stars; it was later expanded by the Henry Draper Extension (HDE), published between 1925 and 1936, which gave classifications for 46,850 more stars, and by the Henry Draper Extension Charts (HDEC), published from 1937 to 1949 in the form of charts, which gave classifications for 86,933 more stars. In all, 359,083 stars were classified as of August 2017.
Williamina Paton Stevens Fleming was a Scottish astronomer. She was a single mother hired by the director of the Harvard College Observatory to help in the photographic classification of stellar spectra. She helped develop a common designation system for stars and cataloged more than ten thousand stars, 59 gaseous nebulae, over 310 variable stars, and 10 novae and other astronomical phenomena. Among several career achievements that advanced astronomy, Fleming is noted for her discovery of the Horsehead Nebula in 1888.
Annie Jump Cannon was an American astronomer whose cataloging work was instrumental in the development of contemporary stellar classification. With Edward C. Pickering, she is credited with the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme, which was the first serious attempt to organize and classify stars based on their temperatures and spectral types. She was nearly deaf throughout her career after 1893, as a result of scarlet fever. She was a suffragist and a member of the National Women's Party.
Edward Charles Pickering was an American astronomer and physicist and the older brother of William Henry Pickering. Along with Carl Vogel, Pickering discovered the first spectroscopic binary stars. He wrote Elements of Physical Manipulations.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt was an American astronomer. Her discovery of how to effectively measure vast distances to remote galaxies led to a shift in the scale and understanding of the scale and the nature of the universe. Nomination of Leavitt for the Nobel Prize had to be halted because of her death.
The Harvard College Observatory (HCO) is an institution managing a complex of buildings and multiple instruments used for astronomical research by the Harvard University Department of Astronomy. It is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, and was founded in 1839. With the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, it forms part of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.
Antonia Caetana de Paiva Pereira Maury was an American astronomer who was the first to detect and calculate the orbit of a spectroscopic binary. She published an important early catalog of stellar spectra using her own system of stellar classification, which was later adopted by the International Astronomical Union. She also spent many years studying the binary star Beta Lyrae. Maury was part of the Harvard Computers, a group of female astronomers and human computers at the Harvard College Observatory.
The Engraved Hourglass Nebula is a young planetary nebula in the southern constellation Musca. It was discovered by Annie Jump Cannon and Margaret W. Mayall during their work on an extended Henry Draper Catalogue. At the time, it was designated simply as a small faint planetary nebula. Much improved telescopes and imaging techniques allowed the hourglass shape of the nebula to be discovered by Romano Coradi and Hugo Schwarz in images taken during 1991–1992 at the European Southern Observatory. It is conjectured that MyCn 18's hourglass shape is produced by the expansion of a fast stellar wind within a slowly expanding cloud which is denser near its equator than its poles. The vivid colours given off by the nebula are the result of different 'shells' of elements being expelled from the dying star, in this case helium, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon.
The Bright Star Catalogue, also known as the Yale Catalogue of Bright Stars, Yale Bright Star Catalogue, or just YBS, is a star catalogue that lists all stars of stellar magnitude 6.5 or brighter, which is roughly every star visible to the naked eye from Earth. The catalog lists 9,110 objects, of which 9,095 are stars, 11 are novae or supernovae, and four are non-stellar objects which are the globular clusters 47 Tucanae and NGC 2808 (HR 3671), and the open clusters NGC 2281 (HR 2496) and Messier 67 (HR 3515).
Slitless spectroscopy is spectroscopy done without a small slit to allow only light from a small region to be diffracted. It works best in sparsely populated fields, as it spreads each point source out into its spectrum, and crowded fields can be too confused to be useful for some applications. It also faces the problem that for extended sources, nearby emission lines will overlap. This technique is a basic form of snapshot hyperspectral imaging. Slitless spectroscopy is used for astronomical surveys and in fields, such as solar physics, where time evolution is important. Both types of application benefit from higher speed operation of a slitless spectrograph: conventional spectrographs require multiple exposures, scanning the slit across the target, to acquire a complete spectral image, while a slitless spectrograph can capture a complete image plane in one exposure.
HD 2039 is a yellow dwarf or yellow subgiant star in the constellation Phoenix. The star is not visible to the naked eye, and lies 280 light years away from the Sun. HD 2039 is a relatively stable star, and an exoplanet at least three times the mass of the planet Jupiter has been discovered in its orbit; this exoplanet, known as HD 2039 b, was the 100th exoplanet to be discovered.
The Harvard Computers were a team of women working as skilled workers to process astronomical data at the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The team was directed by Edward Charles Pickering and, following his death in 1919, by Annie Jump Cannon.
The women were challenged to make sense of these patterns by devising a scheme for sorting the stars into categories. Annie Jump Cannon's success at this activity made her famous in her own lifetime, and she produced a stellar classification system that is still in use today. Antonia Maury discerned in the spectra a way to assess the relative sizes of stars, and Henrietta Leavitt showed how the cyclic changes of certain variable stars could serve as distance markers in space.
HD 40307 is an orange (K-type) main-sequence star located approximately 42 light-years away in the constellation of Pictor, taking its primary name from its Henry Draper Catalogue designation. It is calculated to be slightly less massive than the Sun. The star has six known planets, three discovered in 2008 and three more in 2012. One of them, HD 40307 g, is a potential super-Earth in the habitable zone, with an orbital period of about 200 days. This object might be capable of supporting liquid water on its surface, although much more information must be acquired before its habitability can be assessed.
HD 156668 is a star in the northern constellation of Hercules constellation. With an apparent visual magnitude of 8.4 it is too faint to be viewed with the naked eye, but it can be seen with even a small telescope. The distance to this object has been determined directly using the parallax technique, yielding a value of about 80 light-years.
S Apodis, also known as HD 133444 is a variable star located in the southern circumpolar constellation Apus. It has an apparent magnitude ranging from 9.6 to 17, which is below the limit for naked eye visibility. The object is located relatively far at a distance of approximately 15,000 light years based on Gaia DR3 parallax measurements, but it is drifting closer with a heliocentric radial velocity of −75 km/s.
Mary Anna Draper, also known as Mary Anna Palmer Draper, was an American, known for her work with her husband, Henry Draper, with astronomical photography and research. She helped found the Mount Wilson Observatory and created an award for astronomical research, the Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences.
HD 198404 is a star in the equatorial constellation Delphinus. It has an apparent magnitude of 6.19, allowing it to be faintly seen with the naked eye. Parallax measurements place the object at a distance of 395 light years and it is approaching the Solar System with a heliocentric radial velocity of −21.6 km/s.
OY Arae, also known as Nova Arae 1910, is a nova in the constellation Ara. It was discovered by Williamina Fleming on a Harvard Observatory photographic plate taken on April 4, 1910. At that time it had a magnitude of 6.0, making it faintly visible to the naked eye under ideal observing conditions. Examination of earlier plates showed that before the outburst it was a magnitude 17.5 object, and by March 19, 1910, it had reached magnitude 12.
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