Born: Unknown, United States (assumed)
Died: Unknown
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from What Women Have Done for Astronomy in the United States, written by Anne P McKenney and published in Popular Astronomy, vol. 12, pp.171-182 in 1904.
The Observatory has a corps of about forty assistants, seventeen of whom are women, twelve of these are engaged more or less on photographic work. Photographs obtained with the various telescopes now in use at the Harvard Observatory are of various classes. The most important of these are chart plates having exposures of from ten to sixty minutes; spectrum plates having the same exposure and heat plates having several exposures of a few seconds duration. Women assistants are not engaged during the night in taking photographs, but find their time during the day sufficiently occupied in examining, measuring and discussing them and in the various computations therein involved.
The most important work at present along this line is being done from the chart plates taken with the eight-inch Draper telescope. This consists in the measurement of stars for standards of stellar magnitudes. Measurement of about forty thousand plates are now being made by Miss Eva F. Leland, Miss L. D. Wells and Miss C. S. Stevens and have shown great accuracy in making the identification of stars shown in the photographs with those contained in existing catalogues. Photographs of stellar spectra are all carefully examined. in order to detect new objects of interest such as 3rd, 4th and 5th type stars or those whose spectra consists mainly of bright lines. Many interesting discoveries have been made from the study of these photographs of stellar spectra.