The Scientific Odyssey

In the first part of a multi episode series, we look at the lives of two very different women.  Williamina Fleming and Antonia Maury both made significant contributions to the field of stellar spectroscopy by developing classification systems to better understand the light from stars but their different backgrounds and training meant that they understood the role of being a calculator very differently.

This week we take an in-depth look at the work done at the Harvard College Observatory on cataloging and classifying variable stars under the direction of Charles Edward Pickering.  We examine the contributions of Williamina Fleming, Annie Jump Cannon and Henrietta Swan Leavitt that resulted in the the period luminosity relationship, also known as Leavitt's Law.

The Scientific Odyssey Unscripted: Weather Forecasting and the JPSS Program

In the years between 1905 and 1911, the astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Russell Norris developed a way of representing the accumulating astronomical and astrophysical data on stars that revealed the presence of a relationship between a stars brightness and its temperature.  This Hertzsprung-Russell or H-R Diagram would come to revolutionize our understanding of stellar evolution.

This week, with the help of steampunk attired lady and gentleman bugs, we take a look at the Doppler effect.  We use water waves, sound and light to examine the consequences of what happens with the observer of a wave is moving with respect to the wave's source.  We also look at the history of the idea from the work of Christian Doppler to the applications suggested by Ernst Mach.

This week we look at the spectral classification work of Antonia Maury and Annie Jump Cannon at the Harvard College Observatory.

In this week's episode we look at the early work of the Harvard College Observatory under the direction of Edward Charles Pickering.  We discuss his three big research initiatives: the visual photometric survey of stars, the All-Sky Survey and Catalogue and the Draper Memorial Catalogue that catalogued and classified the spectra of over 10,000 individual stars.  Instrumental in this last effort was Williamina Fleming: Pickering's one time housekeeper turned lead calculator in the project.

When Kirchhoff and Bunsen unlocked elemental spectra, they opened a new avenue of astrophysical investigation.  This work work was originally done by the quartet of Lewis Rutherfurd, Astronomer Royal George Airy, Father Angelo Secchi and William Huggins.  This work would lead to advances by Hermann Carl Vogel and Norman Lockyer who would be among those to propose an early model of stellar evolution.

In 1861, Gustav Kirchhoff published the astonishing results that he could, merely by examining the light received from the Sun, determine what elements it was made from.  One this episode, we'll trace the scientific investigation of the nature of light from Isaac Newton through Joseph Fraunhofer to the work of Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen.

In this episode we look at the various methods to determine the distances to the stars including Christiaan Huygens' comparison method, Robert Hooke's zenith telescope and Wilhelm Struve's and Freidrich Bessel's telescopic measurements.  We also review the various ideas as to the distributions of these stars as advanced by Isaac Newton, William Stuckley, Thomas Wright and William Herschel.

In this episode we examine the fates of Phaeton, Vulcan and Pluto as they were thought of by Olbers, Le Verrier and Clyde Tombaugh.  We also examine the observations of James Craig Watson, introduce William Henry Pickering and follow the work of Percival Lowell.

We look at the lives and scientific contributions of the extended Herschel family.

William Herschel was a Hanoverian musician turned British astronomer.  In this episode we look at his journey from military band oboist to the court astronomer of King George III.  Along the way we look at his work as a composer and orchestral director, his entry into the field of astronomical instrument construction and his bringing the techniques of natural history to astronomical investigation.

This week we look at the work of William Herschel, Giuseppe Piazzi, Heinrich Olbers, Urbain Le Verrier, Alexis Bouvard and Johann Galle as they discovered new worlds in a Newtonian solar system.  We consider the mathematical frameworks of Laplace and the Titius-Bode Law as guiding physical laws for the investigation of the natural universe.

Following the publication of Newton's Principia, the extended process of adoption began.  In this episode, we look at what barriers there were to Newton's ideas and how they were overcome.  We also look at the acceptance of heliocentricism and the reworking of Newton's mathematical formalism up through the work of Pierre-Simon Laplace.