Misfortunes as Blessings in Disguise

Résumé du livre

This is an autobiography of major American senior research astronomer at Yale University. Born in 1907 in Alabama, she earned her Ph. D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College in 1938. She started her career as a research assistant at the Harvard College Observatory in 1929, eventually being hired as an astronomer at Harvard in 1948. She moved to Yale in 1956, staying until her 1975 retirement. She was the author of the Bright Star Catalogue, a compendium of information on the 9,110 brightest stars in the sky; she also co-authored The General Catalogue of Trigonometric Stellar Parallaxes, containing precise distance measurements to thousands of stars, which was critical to understanding the kinematics of the Milky Way galaxy and the evolution of the solar neighborhood. In 1988, she was awarded the George Van Biesbroeck Prize by the American Astronomical Society for a lifetime of service to astronomy. She died one month after her 100th birthday in 2007.