Celebrating Female Astronomers

August first is a day to honor women in astronomy, so it’s a great time to teach kids about the many female astronomers, computers and other experts who have shaped the way we see the universe.

I was trying to figure out if there’s a reason Women’s Astronomy Day is August 1, but the best I could come up with is that it’s the day German astronomer Caroline Hershel (1750 – 1848) discovered her first comet. She was known for discovering nebulas and comets, and has one named after her, 35P/Herschel-Rigollet. She was also the first woman to receive the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.

I don’t know if that’s the reason, but we’ll call it that.

If you’re a little low on education in famous female astronomers yourself, I’m here to help. That information on Caroline Hershel came from ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, which has a page full of short bios of female astronomers you can check out.

Astronomy.com has a PDF you can download with stories about 10 female astronomers we all ought to know more about, from Katherine Johnson (known as one of the “Hidden Figures” who computed for NASA and was instrumental in calculating the trajectory for the first manned space flights) to Vera Rubin, who helped discover dark matter. It’s a little outdated but still good basic information to start with.

Or you can learn about Maria Mitchell, who discovered a comet in 1847 and was the first female member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the first astronomy professor at Vassar. She’s known as America’s first female astronomer, and the website for the Maria Mitchell Association has a great lesson plan and information for students wanting to learn more about her.

There’s also a lot of great information about the female astronomers of Harvard University from the late 1800s and early 1900s. Annie Cannon is one of the most well-known, as she catalogued more than 20,000 stars and her system of classification was adopted with few alterations by the International Astronomical Union in 1910. And Henrietta Leavitt discovered how to tell how far stars are from Earth based on their brightness.

For older students, choosing one of these scientists to learn more about would be fruitful and remind them that science has rarely been an exclusively male domain, we just don’t normally take the time to learn about the women who did much groundbreaking work. It’s time to change that!

[Photos: Katherine Johnson via NASA, Maria Mitchell via Maria Mitchell Association, Annie Cannon via Carleton.]

When my daughter was younger I would spend a lot of time trying to come up with activities she could do in the car on long road trips and things to entertain her when we were waiting at restaurants and things that didn’t involve screens.

But it turns out there are a lot of great activities you can do with just a piece of paper and a pen.

What Do We Do All Day has a great collection of pen and paper games, including some that can be done with just one person, though they’re all more fun if you have at least two.

There are some classics on here like hangman and dots and boxes, but there are also quite a few I hadn’t heard of before.

I don’t want to spoil the whole list for you because you should definitely click over there and look around, but I will share about the one that you see pictured above.

This game is called Bridges, and you start by making the big random shape and the dividing it into a bunch of sections (the post says 30-50 sections is ideal but I think this one is smaller than that).

Each player gets their own color marker and you take turns drawing bridges from one space to another, crossing a third. Once there’s a bridge, no other bridges can start, end or cross in those spaces. Keep going until no more bridges can be built, and the person who makes the last bridge wins.

Check out the post over at What We Do All Day for more great ideas for no or almost-no prep games you can play with your kids or that kids can play together. I’d love to know if you have a favorite paper and pen game, whether it’s on this list or a different one.

[Photo: What We Do All Day]

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