Not just that, but Annie retained a terrifying ability to recall all of them. For reference’s sake, Williamina Fleming, the aforementioned goddamned genius, only cataloged 10,000. At the peak of her career, she could classify three stars per minute, which led to her cataloging upwards of 350,000 over her lifetime. Whereas previously, all stars had been lumped into categories of A, B, and C, she came up with the classification system of O, B, A, F, G, K, M, R, N, S, which has been remembered for years now with the mnemonic of “Oh, be a fine girl, kiss me right now, sweet.” By 1910, Annie’s system had become the de-facto standard, and, with minor modifications, remains so to this day. Tasked with classifying stars based on a huge catalog of astronomic spectography, Annie quickly realized that the classification system they were using was woefully inadequate - so she made her own. Early 1900s Harvard folk, you suck.Īnnie quickly became a phenomenal astronomer. After that, he only hired women, reasoning that they were better at detailed work.Īt the time, though, they were largely referred to as “Pickering’s Harem.” Sigh. As the story goes, Pickering, as head of the Harvard Observatory, became so fed up with a (male) grad student’s incompetence, he hired his maid to prove that even she could do better – only to find out that she was a goddamned genius. Far from a squad of Transformers-esque shapeshifters, the Harvard Computers were an all-female team of astronomy analysts who worked for Edward Pickering in the early 1900s. No, really: Annie’s story begins in earnest around age 33, when she became a Harvard Computer. When some beaus come callin’, Annie nopes off to study astronomy in grad school.Seeing how much she likes school, her parents send her to college (!).By her teens, Annie’s memorized a working map of the night sky. Mom says “screw piano” and sneaks Annie up to the attic to stargaze.Liz Freese's handsome, airy setting features a skylight high upstage, made up of six panels showing an ever-changing array of evocative projections.Īnnie Jump Cannon (1863-1941): The Queen of Modern AstronomyĪnnie Jump Cannon’s middle-class Victorian-era biography could have easily gone something like this:īut thankfully for the field of astronomy (and humanity at large), Annie led a life less conventional: ![]() Udden brings charm and the right light touch to the hesitant romance and later, quiet depth and dignity to the profound scene between Margaret and the ailing Henrietta. ![]() At Harvard, Henrietta discovers she's been hired as one of the "women computers" whose job is to catalog the stars on the basis of glass photo plates made by their male colleagues. The first scene shows Henrietta leaving her home in Wisconsin to take a job at the Harvard Observatory and establishes the loving yet conflict-ridden relationship between the heroine and her sister, Margaret. The added dimension is that, with the new technical and scenic capabilities and more generously proportioned stage, Main Street can apply production values several degrees above what was previously possible. ![]() Add Udden's graceful, quietly effective direction and an engaging cast led by Shannon Emerick, spot-on in a role she was born to play, and you have what fans have come to recognize as a typical Main Street Theater production. Silent Sky a starry winner for Main Street With its admirable Houston premiere of Lauren Gunderson's "Silent Sky," both the company and founding artistic director Rebecca Greene Udden are working confidently in characteristic mode.
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