Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections Second Edition Paperback – Illustrated, 21 Mar. 1996

Mucho

This book is the life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin as she remembered it. She is remembered as the greatest woman astronomer who ever lived. She starts with her family history and then goes into her childhood. She was born and raised in England in 1900. She tells how her parents and the English school system discrimated against girls and how it hurt her education and destroyed her social life. Fighting an uphill battle she did get a good education. But as those in power in England would not hire women with her degree(! yes, its true),she came to Harvard University under a fellowship. She started working under Harlow Shapley there, who gave her much freedom in choice of the fields she worked on but who underpaid women who worked in the astronomy department. I recommend this book to show how a very great woman changed the science of astronomy by having the courage to overcome the dicrimination she faced both in England and the United States. Read this book and discover things about both countries that you did not know about either country.

Great book amazing woman.

Way over-priced. Not sure what makes this so costly. Paperback, smaller than most textbooks.

I saw the previous review and had to write a real review for those interested in this book. The book has effectively four introductory essays by Virginia Trimble, Jesse Greenstein, Peggy Kidwell, and Katherine Haramundanis. Each of these essays are well worth reading on their own and they place Cecilia Payne, later Payne-Gaposchkin by marriage, in context. I will refer to her as "CPG" from now on.The part of the book written by CPG, "The Dyer's Hand" is a memoir of growing up in England, being a woman scientist at Cambridge, and moving to Harvard to become an astronomer when being a woman still made the directors of the Harvard Observatory immediate think of placing you in the pool of woman calculators -- underpaid and not considered on the scientific level of the men. CPG helped change that. She applied the then new ideas of Saha to the analysis of the sun's spectrum and realized that the sun was made up of a huge amount of hydrogen compared to helium and the other elements. Up to the publication of her thesis in the 1920's no one really understood that stars were mostly hydrogen and helium. Earlier observations had been incorrectly interpreted as showing that the sun had the same abundances of the elements as the earth. CPG helped force astronomers to revise their stellar models -- the first step to truly understanding the stars and the composition of the universe.Her working life spanned roughly 50 years and she devoted her life to astronomy even though it was not until the 1950's that Harvard woke up and gave her a job title other than "assistant" to the director of the observatory. She helped create our understanding of how stars work. She was a gifted writer. This is an amazing life and the autobiography is necessary reading.