But he could have at least mentioned the astronomy student’s lament: “Oh Boy, Another F’s Gonna Kill Me”.)Īfter a commercial, we jump to another Harvard scholar, Cecilia Payne (voiced by Kirsten Dunst), who came to the school in 1923 and used Cannon’s spectral classifications to revolutionize our knowledge of the composition of the stars - most of the suckers are made of hydrogen and helium, an insight so radical that her dissertation was initially rejected by astronomer Henry Norris Russell.
(Does Tyson mention the sexist mnemonic - “Oh, Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me” - associated with those classes? He does not, because he is An Gentleman. She developed and refined the “Harvard classification scheme,” which classed stars into seven categories by letter - O, B, A, F, G, K, M - and then further broke each letter into ten gradations.
I wonder why?” says Tyson, with exactly the right amount of disappointment in our country’s science education … and/or history of educating women.Ĭannon, a Wellesley grad, used spectroscopy to classify different types of stars by their spectrums, which reveal what elements exist within the stars. “For some reason, you’ve probably never heard of either of them. And she did.) “Pickering’s harem” (such charming quaint terms!) included some pretty brilliant astronomers, like Annie Jump Cannon (voiced in the animation by Marlee Matlin), who developed the standard classification system for stars, and Henrietta Swan Leavitt, whose work made it possible to determine distances between stars and the size of the universe itself. Does Phyllis Schlafly know about this benefit of gender wage gaps? (Anecdote from the wiki that could just as well have gone into the animated segment but did not: the first woman Pickering hired, Williamina Fleming, originally worked for Pickering as a domestic she got her job because the astronomer was so irritated at his male assistants that he declared his maid could do a better job.
In the Kiowa legend, women chased by angry bears are lifted to the sky by a friendly rock, and the bears’ claws on the sides of the rock formed the volcanic remnant that boring Europeans named “Devil’s Tower” - and somehow Neil deGrasse Tyson sits under the stars by that mountain without whistling the Close Encounters theme.Īfter the commercial break, we zip off to Harvard in 1901 to meet astronomer Charles Pickering’s “computers” - the women who mapped and classified stars, largely because Pickering could hire a larger team with his limited budget. An animated segment shows us the Kiowa and ancient Greek stories of the Pleiades, the star cluster that - aha! - has been depicted in legend as a group of maidens or sisters. We start off with a brief review of the constellations, those star-patterns that humans have found mythic pictures in, though not the same pictures from culture to culture. Also, this week’s episode reprises a line of old-school Carl Sagan narration that has become something of a nerd touchstone - which we’ll get to later. This week, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey is determined to get cute with its episode title: “Sisters of the Sun” is about our sun’s stellar sisters - all the other types of stars out there - but the episode is also about the women at Harvard who, in the early decades of the 20th century, made key discoveries about those stars, what they’re made of, and how they’ll eventually die.