In honor of Women's History Month and in celebration of the 86th anniversary of the publication of her definitive catalogue of variable stars in globular clusters, we offer this article about Dr. Helen Hogg, first published in Sky & Telescope in September 2024.
By Anne Saker
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| Helen Sawyer Hogg. Image credit: University of Toronto |
At 16, [Helen] enrolled at Mount Holyoke College as a chemistry major. Then she witnessed the total solar eclipse of Jan. 24, 1925.
“Despite my horribly cold feet standing in nearly a foot of snow,” she wrote later, “the incredible beauty and grandeur of a total eclipse tied me to astronomy for life.”
Helen came to the notice of Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard College Observatory, and he awarded her a $650 fellowship to pursue a doctorate with him, studying star clusters.
In these dense stellar neighborhoods, also called globular clusters, some stars brighten and dim, on their own or because something else is acting on them. By the late 1920s, astronomers used that variability to measure galactic distances.
Observing and photographing globular clusters demanded hours at the eyepiece, tweaking the telescope’s Newtonian focus. Under Shapley’s direction, Helen catalogued every variable star she captured and, ahead of her PhD from Radcliffe College, her name appeared on a dozen papers.
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