Eyes on the Sky:
Who Gets to Look?

Discovered eight comets and catalogued over 2,500 nebulae and star clusters. The first woman to be paid for scientific work by the British Crown — at half her brother William's salary. Awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1828, a recognition not repeated for a woman for 168 years.

Discovered 2,400 variable stars and found the period-luminosity relationship that allowed astronomers to measure cosmic distances for the first time. Edwin Hubble used her work to prove the universe is expanding. Modern cosmology rests, in part, on her shoulders. She died before being told the full significance of what she had done — and a Nobel Prize nomination arrived after her death. You cannot award a Nobel Prize posthumously.

Came to Harvard as a maid. Went on to discover the Horsehead Nebula and catalogue thousands of stars. Supervised a team of women computers. Her extraordinary journey from domestic servant to one of the most productive astronomers of her era is rarely foregrounded in the telling of her story.

Created the Harvard Classification Scheme for stars — the system still used by astronomers today. Classified over 350,000 stars in her lifetime. A committed suffragette who worked until the day she died. Paid as a computer, not recognised as an astronomer.

Proved that stars are made primarily of hydrogen and helium — one of the most significant discoveries in 20th-century astronomy. Her supervisor told her she was wrong and advised her to retract her finding. He later published the same conclusion himself and received the credit.

Calculated the trajectories for Alan Shepard's first American spaceflight and John Glenn's orbital mission. Glenn refused to fly until she personally verified the computer's calculations. Worked under racial segregation at NASA Langley. Received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, at age 97.

The first Black woman supervisor at NASA. Foreseeing that machine computers would replace human ones, she taught herself FORTRAN and then taught the language to her entire team — an extraordinary act of collective leadership that ensured her colleagues would not be left behind.

NASA's first Black female engineer. Had to petition the City of Hampton, Virginia, for special permission to attend a segregated training course just to do her job. Later became Federal Women's Program Manager, directing her talent toward opening doors for the next generation.

Provided the foundational observational evidence for dark matter — one of the most consequential discoveries in modern cosmology. Repeatedly passed over for the Nobel Prize despite her discovery being among the most significant of the 20th century. The first woman officially permitted to observe at the Palomar Observatory.

Discovered pulsars as a graduate student in 1967 — one of the most important astronomical discoveries of the 20th century. The Nobel Prize in Physics went to her male supervisors. She has spoken about this with remarkable grace for decades. In 2018 she donated her £2.3 million Breakthrough Prize to fund scholarships for underrepresented groups in physics.

The first woman President of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, serving 1957–1958. Worked for years without pay because institutions were not permitted to employ both a husband and wife. Wrote a weekly astronomy column for the Toronto Star for thirty years. Believed — and wrote — that the stars belong to everyone. The Calgary Centre of the RASC adopted those words as their motto.

Dr. Jennifer Wiseman grew up on a farm in rural Arkansas, looking up at dark skies as a child. She went on to earn a physics degree from MIT — where she discovered a comet as an undergraduate — and a PhD in Astronomy from Harvard. Today she is a senior astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the Senior Project Scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope, responsible for ensuring the mission remains as scientifically productive as possible. She works with world-class scientists across the globe studying everything from planets in our solar system to the most distant galaxies, and champions the intersection of science, ethics, and public engagement.

Alyssa Pagan is a Science Visuals Developer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, where she transforms raw data from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes into the breathtaking colour images seen by millions around the world. She holds a degree in Art and Design and a second degree in Astronomy — and it was partway through her journey that she realised, as she has described herself, that she could do math. Among her most celebrated work: the Cosmic Cliffs of the Carina Nebula and the Pillars of Creation — some of the first JWST images ever released to the public. She is living proof that there is art in the science, and science in the art.