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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday August 29 2017, @11:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the space-the-final-frontier dept.

In a cramped Harvard University sub-basement, a team of women is working to document the rich history of women astronomers.

More than 40 years before women gained the right to vote, female "computers" at Harvard College Observatory were making major astronomical discoveries.

Between 1885 and 1927, the observatory employed about 80 women who studied glass plate photographs of the stars. They found galaxies and nebulas and created methods to measure distance in space.

They were famous - newspapers wrote about them, they published scientific papers under their own names. But they were virtually forgotten during the next century.

But a recent discovery of thousands of pages of their calculations by a modern group of women has spurred new interest in their legacy.

A worthy effort, though the correct term for "female 'computer'" is "femputer", at least according to Futurama.


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  • (Score: 2, Funny) by aristarchus on Wednesday August 30 2017, @01:54AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Wednesday August 30 2017, @01:54AM (#561260) Journal

    Sing it, Bro!

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