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Helen Sawyer Hogg, a notable American-Canadian astronomer, was born on August 1, 1905 in Lowell, Massachusetts.

She pioneered research into globular clusters and variable stars. She was the first female president of several astronomical organizations and a notable woman of science in a time when many universities would not award scientific degrees to women. Her scientific advocacy and journalism included astronomy columns in the Toronto Star ("With the Stars", 1951–81) and the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada ("Out of Old Books", 1946–65).

Hogg first became fascinated by astronomy as a student at Mount Holyoke College. She changed her major from chemistry to astronomy and graduated magna cum laude. With the help of Annie Cannon, she then received a fellowship for graduate study at Harvard Observatory to work with Harlow Shapley. Radcliffe College awarded her a master's degree in 1928 and a PhD in 1931. (Harvard didn't award them to women.)

She married fellow student Frank Hogg and after she was awarded her doctorate, and they moved to Victoria, British Columbia, where he was employed at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory. The observatory wouldn't offer her a job, but this didn't stop her research. She was accepted as a volunteer assistant to her husband in order to use a telescope to continue her study variable star studies. Her groundbreaking work in astronomical catalogues that are still in use, as are the subsequent catalogues she completed.

In 1935 the family moved to Ontario when Frank was offered a job at the University of Toronto. Helen continued her observing at their David Dunlop Observatory and was given a job as a research assistant.

From 1939 to 1941, Hogg returned to America to serve as the president of the American Association of Variable Star Observers and as acting chair of Mount Holyoke's astronomy department. Upon returning to the David Dunlap Observatory, she took on teaching duties at the university. The male staff were away due to World War II, but she kept her position when the war was over. Hogg advanced to assistant professor in 1951, associate professor in 1955, full professor in 1957, and professor emerita in 1976 upon her retirement. During her research career Hogg published more than 200 papers, and was a leading authority in astronomy.

Hogg was also very active in promoting astronomy to the public and in encouraging women into science.

[Wikipedia; Obituary in the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada]
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Martha Betz Shapley was born on August 3, 1890 in Kansas City, Missouri. Her husband was Harlow Shapley, a well known astronomer and director of the Harvard College Observatory for many years. What has not been so well known is that she was an accomplished mathematician and also herself an astronomer.

Martha Betz met Harlow Shapley at the University of Missouri. In later life he reminisced:

Although a mathematician, she went on to go to Bryn Mawr College to work for a Ph.D. in Teutonic philology. From there, she made frequent visits to Princeton, where Shapley was doing his Ph.D. under Henry Norris Russell. They married after he finished his Ph.D and he persuaded her to give up her Ph.D to go to California where they both went to work as astronomers at Mount Wilson Observatory.

Martha carried out work on eclipsing binary systems and produced a series of papers “that represented outstanding contributions for the time.” She also collaborated with her husband and they produced some joint papers.

When Harlow Shapley was appointed Director of the Harvard Observatory, they moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. She continued her work on eclipsing binaries for awhile but with five children, she began to focus on the family and to act as hostess at the observatory.

During World War II, however, Martha also undertook war work using her mathematical skills computing the trajectories of shells for the Navy. After the war, working with the same group, she :-
Once her children grew up and left the family home, Martha Shapley went back to her astronomical research. Her work culminated in Catalogue of the Elements of Eclipsing Binaries (co-authored with Zdeněk Kopal), her last contribution to astronomy.

The Princeton Alumni Weekly interviewed her in 1964 and reported that

[Source: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive]
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Svetlana Savitskaya was born on August 8, 1948 in Moscow, Russian Soviet Republic. She was a Soviet aviator who set several FAI world records as a pilot. (FAI is the Fédération aéronautique internationale - in English, the World aeronautical federation.) As a cosmonaut, she was the second woman in space, the first woman to carry out a spacewalk, and the first woman to fly into space twice.

In 1995, Savitskaya gave an interview to Baltimore Sun journalist Clara Germani. She recalled encountering some sexism from her male crewmates and that upon entering Salyut 7 for the first time, Valentin Lebedev presented her with an apron and told her "to get to work". She stated that "I was quickly able to establish a working, professional relationship with them."

[Source: Wikipedia]

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On August 12, 1919, Anglo-American astrophysicist Margaret Burbridge (nee Peachey) was born in Cheshire, England.

Margalit Fox's obituary in the New York Times:
Burbridge made notable contributions to the theory of quasars, to measurements of the rotation and masses of galaxies, and was the lead author on a groundbreaking paper describing how chemical elements are formed in the depths of stars through nuclear fusion. She was the first woman to be president of the American Astronomical Society.
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Margaret Lindsay Murray - who would become Lady Huggins - was born on August 14, 1848 in Dublin, Ireland. An early interest in astronomy is attributed to her grandfather who taught her the constellations. She went on to study the heavens with a home-made spectroscope.

Her interest and abilities in spectroscopy and photography led to her introduction to the astronomer William Huggins, whom she married in 1875. Evidence suggests that she was instrumental in instigating William Huggins' successful program of photographic research. She used her background in photography to facilitate early spectroscopic photography.

Together the pair were pioneers in the field of spectroscopy, and from their discoveries together they wrote the Atlas of Representative Stellar Spectra.

It took William eight years to acknowledge her co-equal role in their laboratory by placing her name on the reports of their joint work. Even after his death she never attempted to outline her own role in the technical and theoretical development of their pioneering work in spectral astrophotography. But she left behind her notebooks, and the story they tell is at odds with the Victorian face the Hugginses showed to the British astronomical community.
 
Margaret Huggins willed her scientific and artistic treasures to Wellesley Women's College in the USA, as she admired the academic achievements of American women and supported women's education.

[Source: Wikipedia]
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Margaret Hamilton – American computer scientist and systems engineer – was born on August 17, 1936 in Paoli, Indiana.

Hamilton majored in mathematics and minored in philosophy for her B.A. degree. She intended to do graduate study in abstract mathematics at Brandeis University, but took an interim job at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) on a project to develop weather prediction software. It was the early 1960s when software development was in its infancy, and programmers learned as they worked. Discovering that she had a flair for the work, the PhD was abandoned.

Her success at MIT led her to NASA as lead developer for Apollo flight software. Hamilton invented the term software engineering to describe what they were doing. It became recognized as an engineering discipline. Her rigorous systems approach to the Apollo software was essential to its success. She said about Apollo, “There was no second chance. We all knew that.” When no bugs were found in any of the crewed Apollo missions, the software was adapted for Skylab and the Space Shuttle.

Margaret Hamilton standing next to the navigation software that she and her MIT team produced for the Apollo Project.
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Nitza Margarita Cintrón was born on August 17, 1950 in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

She earned her bachelor's degree in biology at the University of Puerto Rico and was then accepted into the biochemistry and molecular biology training program offered by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In 1978 she was awarded her Ph.D. She answered a NASA advertisement for the first Mission Specialist positions in the Astronaut Corps, but was not accepted due to her poor eyesight. Yet NASA was still impressed, and offered her a position with them as a scientist.

Cintrón was the originator of the Biochemistry Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center. And from 1979 to 1985, she was also project scientist for the Space Lab 2 mission which was launched by the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1985.

After many years of service at NASA, she was sponsored by NASA after she was accepted as a student by the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. She graduated in 1995 with a M.D. degree, and is currently a board-certified specialist in internal medicine.

Among the positions held by Cintrón at NASA are "Chief of the Biomedical Operations and Research Branch in the Medical Science Division" and "Managing Director of the Life Sciences Research Laboratories" in support of medical operations. In 2004 she was named "Chief of NASA's (JSC) Space Medicine and Health Care Systems Office", position which she currently holds.

[Source: Wikipedia]
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Sarah Frances Whiting was an American physicist and astronomer, born August 23,1847.

She was appointed by Wellesley College in Boston, Massachusetts as its first professor of physics in 1876. Invited to attend lectures given by Edward Pickering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she was inspired to start teaching a course on Practical Astronomy at Wellesley. She taught several astronomers including Annie Jump Cannon. Whiting helped with the establishment of the Whitin Observatory, of which she was the first director. The observatory is still in use at Wellesley College.
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Katherine Johnson (née Coleman) was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, on August 26, 1918. She excelled academically, finishing high school at the age of 14 and graduating summa cum laude from West Virginia State College with a double major in mathematics and French when she was 18. Following a brief stint working as a public school teacher, Johnson became the first African American woman admitted to graduate school at West Virginia University, enrolling in the graduate mathematics programme.

In 1953, Johnson started working at the all-Black West Area Computing section of the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which would later become the space agency NASA. In addition to the computing pool, the toilets and cafeteria at Langley were also racially segregated at the time. Johnson refused to use the “colored” toilets and ate lunch at her desk.

Within two weeks of working at Langley, Johnson's talent landed her a position in the Flight Research Division. Over the next four years, she worked alongside aeronautical engineers analysing data from flight tests.

In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and in April 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit Earth. Meanwhile, at NACA (which had since become NASA), Johnson had been working on the trajectory analysis for the US’s first human space flight. In May 1961, astronaut Alan Shepard became the first US citizen and second person in the world to go to space.

Less than a year later, NASA was preparing for the mission that would see John Glenn become the first US astronaut to orbit Earth. The agency was relying on a network of computers, programmed with orbital equations that would control the trajectory of Glenn’s capsule. As part of the pre-flight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl” – referring to Johnson – insisting that she run the numbers through the same equations by hand to check the computer’s calculations. “If she says they’re good, then I’m ready to go,”

Johnson went on to join the Space Mechanics Division, where she calculated the trajectory for the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon, and worked on key calculations that helped synchronise the mission’s lunar lander with the moon-orbiting command and service module. Her work helped the US become the first country to land a person on the moon on 20 July 1969.

During her career, Johnson authored multiple research papers and received numerous awards and accolades, including the 2015 US Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by President Barack Obama. In 2016, NASA named a new computational research facility after her.

[Layal Liverpool, New Scientist]

A fascinating story Mona, thank you.