The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars. Dava Sobel. Viking. 2016. 

The ladies in question started working at Harvard Observatory in the late 1800’s and some of them continued their work until the 1930’s and 1940’s. These women were not students at Harvard; they were employees of the Observatory. The first graduate student in Astronomy at Harvard was Cecilia Payne-Goposhkin, in 1924. This book, though it also discusses Payne-Goposhkin’s career, is about the women who worked on cataloguing the stars all through the 1880’s and 1890’s and forward. There’s a whole question in my mind here about the shift from the women who worked with all the data and learned that way to insisting on the importance of the ‘student’ credential. Anyway…

There are six ways that I can think of to discover new things about the natural world. They are observation, classification, prediction, demonstration, experimentation, and invention.  Some people carelessly say that experimentation is the only real way to discover truth about the natural world, to DO Science. While experimentation is certainly vitally important, and a good check on lazy understanding, these other activities produce critical information leading to decisive advances in understanding. 

Dava Sobel’s book has great examples of the importance of these different processes, especially because a lot of astronomy is, necessarily, not experimental.

Crucial to the book is Joseph von Fraunhofer, a Catholic scientist from Austria, orphaned at 11 and died at the age of 39 in 1826. He was responsible for incredible advances in optics, partly on a theoretical level, and partly in a wholly practical way. He made glass that no-one else could make that could be used in telescopes and other equipment. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06250a.htm

Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_von_Fraunhofer . Yes, Wikipedia but it is absolutely fascinating. As always with Wiki, check out the sources used for the article.

I shall stroll down to the beach.