BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Doodles for Women Astronomers *new*

Since 2013 four outstanding women astronomers have been honored by a Google Doodle. None of the Doodles have had a worldwide reach, but there is a link to each delightful drawing and I've given some biographical details. Read on to meet this stellar quartet.

Doodles for Women Astronomers

I was amused by Caroline Herschel's Doodle. Although she was a comet hunter, in her Doodle she seems to be observing the Perseids - or some other meteor shower.

By the way, a meteor shower is best observed without a telescope. A telescope restricts your field of view and you want to see the whole sky.

Maria Mitchell's Doodle shows the sky above her with lots of meteor trails - though not animated like Caroline Herschel's meteor shower! Yet since Mitchell also became famous as the discoverer of a comet, I'm surprised that like Caroline H, no comet was included. Their comets were telescopic ones, so you wouldn't have seen them just to look up, but obviously Doodles are symbolic and artistic, not realistic.

I guess that a telescope is graphics shorthand for showing you have an astronomer. But Beatrice Tinsley wasn't an observational astronomer. She worked using data to make theoretical models. Before computers were around, she did the computations herself. And then took to computers like a duck to water.

Here Beatrice Tinsley is equipped with a telescope and, of course, the obligatory meteor trail. Having had a little laugh at this, I have to admit that I'm not quite sure how you'd represent a theoretical astrophysicist or cosmologist in a cartoon. Any ideas?

I was glad to notice that Annie Cannon doesn't have a telescope in her Google Doodle. She worked from photographic plates of the sky. You can see her looking as though she's catching a star. She classified stars by their light spectra. The spectrum can tell you something about a star's temperature, elements present its atmosphere, and a whole lot else.