Pickering's Harem

Within academic circles, women are often written out of history and their research is left unpublished. This publication celebrates and presents a group of roughly 80 women who worked at The Havard Observatory between 1877–1919 under American astronomer and physicist, Edward Pickering. The women were employed by Pickering to map stars in the sky using photographic plates and the human eye, for minimal or no pay, and became known as ‘Pickering’s Harem’. Between them, they discovered nebulas, millions of stars and developed formulas to categorise the decreasing temperatures of stars—a system that is still in use today.