Post #2476233

2023-05-10 15:13 UTC

“There is no joy more intense than that of coming upon a fact that cannot be understood in terms of currently accepted ideas.&quot; Astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was born #OTD in 1900. She used quantum mechanics to decode the spectral lines of stars and deduce their elemental composition, concluding they are mostly H and He, and was the first woman to be made full professor and department chair at Harvard. Image: Harvard Observatory

Replies (10)

@mcnees@mastodon.social 2023-05-10 15:14

Cecilia Payne was born in England, the daughter of a lawyer and a painter who held the radical view that girls should get the same quality education as boys. She excelled in school, and eventually enrolled at Cambridge. She began visiting the Cambridge Observatory, and asked the staff so many questions that they fetched Eddington to deal with her. He recommended some books for her to read, but she had already read them all. So he just gave her the run of the observatory's research library.

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@fifonetworks@infosec.exchange 2023-05-10 15:29

@mcnees@mastodon.social l learned a non-obvious lesson from this toot, and I want to thank you for it. The lesson I learned is, how to write good alt-text. I would have written, "Picture of Cecilia sitting at her desk." But you just taught me how to write alt-text that allows people with vision disabilities to really experience the wealth of information contained in a picture. So, thank you. My alt-text will be better now.

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@Aviva_Gary@noc.social 2023-05-10 17:21

@mcnees@mastodon.social very cool

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@bitcodavid@hachyderm.io 2023-05-10 17:23

@mcnees@mastodon.social Guess she never had a dog.

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@wikinaut@berlin.social 2023-05-10 18:06

@mcnees@mastodon.social Looks like a member of #Kraftwerk.

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@stargazersmith@social.linux.pizza 2023-05-10 23:05

@mcnees@mastodon.social I believe the 2nd generation Cosmos series gave an account of her story.

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@mmiasma@mastodon.sdf.org 2023-05-10 23:39

@mcnees@mastodon.social What a remarkable person. I loved the quote you started the post with and Shapely's quote that was a sad but apropos pun. Thank you for posting her story.

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@trollball@mstdn.social 2023-05-11 06:14

@mcnees@mastodon.social I know there are no quote tweets on Mastodon, but… wow. This whole thread.

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@Quamatoc@todon.nl 2025-05-14 05:37

@mcnees@mastodon.social Didn't Fraunhofer do something similar with spectra of stars and nebulae?

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@SearingTruth@infosec.exchange 2025-09-25 08:48

@mcnees@mastodon.social "Compassion, the river of life." SearingTruth

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