>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, DC.
>> Mark Sweeney: Good
evening, everyone.
I'm Mark Sweeney, the associate
librarian for Library Services.
And it's my pleasure to welcome
you to the Library of Congress
for the Ninth Annual Kislak Lecture.
I would be remiss in starting
without first thanking Ralph
Ehrenberg and John Hessler for all
of their outstanding efforts in
organizing the conference today,
as well as this evening's lecture.
The Kislak Lecture is an integral
component of a program established
at the Library of Congress
in 2004, for the purpose
of fostering greater
understanding of the culture
and history of the Americas.
This multifaceted program
was made possible
through the generosity of the J. I.
Kislak Foundation.
I'm delighted that Mr. Kislak, who
is one of the Library's greatest
and most enlightened
benefactors, is here tonight.
Mr. Kislak, thank you
for being with us.
[ Applause ]
The centerpiece of the Kislak
gift is unique, extensive,
it's a supremely important
collection of books, manuscripts,
historical documents, maps,
and art of the Americas.
A permanent rotating
exhibition of materials
from the Kislak collection titled,
"Exploring the Early Americas"
opened here in December of 2007.
I think most of you
are familiar with it,
but if this is your first
visit to the Library,
I certainly encourage you to tour
the exhibition on the second floor.
I also want to point out that the
Kislak gift supports fellowships
for the study of the
materials in the collection.
And I must say it's been
very exciting to learn
about the many fresh insights
gained about the Kislak collection
through the efforts of
various fellows over the years.
Returning to the subject at hand,
which is the Annual Kislak Lecture,
I think it's safe to say that
it's one of the premier events
of its kind in the
field of cartography.
It is certainly one
of the highlights
of the year here at the Library.
Previous lecturers in the
Kislak series have included
such distinguished experts as Jared
Diamond, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto,
Michael Coe, Jonathan Spence,
David Stewart and Charles C. Mann.
Tonight, the Library of Congress
is fortunate once again to be able
to present an exciting
world-class speaker.
I will now turn to my colleague,
John Hessler, to introduce her.
John?
[ Applause ]
>> John Hessler: Thank you, Mark,
and thank you all for coming.
One of the great pleasures
of being the curator
of the Kislak collection is not
only to get to study the collection,
interact with the scholars
who come here,
plan and work with our great
exhibits office to work
on the Exploring Early
Americas Exhibit,
but also to select a lecturer
for the annual lecture.
We've had a wide variety of
people speak to this audience.
And it's been on a wide
variety of subjects.
The Kislak Collection itself makes
us sort of rethink the history
of the early Americas,
due to the fact
that it has pre-Columbian
artifacts, postcolonial artifacts,
artifacts that sweep all
the way down from Florida
down into Central America,
down all the way into Peru,
European writings on exploration.
So it makes us kind of
reconsider very broadly,
what is the early Americas?
How is it explored?
How did we find out about it?
And tonight, I have the special
pleasure of introducing Dava Sobel.
Dava Sobel's writings, at least to
me, are some of the most fascinating
and most well-written science
writing that is being done today.
She has brought to audiences
all over the world in many,
many languages really complicated
themes, the longitude, Galileo,
themes that are revolutionary
in the history of science.
She doesn't dumb them down.
She writes narratives that
are extremely beautiful,
that make you feel the
excitement of discovery,
that make you feel the excitement
of scientific exploration.
Her new book is on the
women who actually worked
at the Harvard Observatory and
actually measured the distances
of the stars, which will
come out in the fall.
And so without further adieu, I
am going to give you Dava Sobel,
personally one of my
personal heroes.
[ Applause ]
>> Dava Sobel: Thank you very much.
It really is an honor
and a thrill to be here.
We spent much of today looking at
magnificent maps of land and sea.
And I want to talk to you
about maps of the sky,
especially the Southern Hemisphere.
Okay. So this is the
unprepossessing looking book.
In a photograph, it
looks unprepossessing.
I guess if it were really here
and we could see how big
it was, we would all gasp.
But this is the binding
that contained the two [inaudible]
mover maps, the globe gores,
and also the first
printed star chart.
And it's a star chart of
the Southern Hemisphere.
You might notice there's
a lot of empty space.
This is because the
information is really based
on the ancient world knowledge, and
they hadn't traveled very far South.
But it's a very beautiful object.
It really evokes a period when art
and science were intimately
combined;
exploration and imagination.
It's beautifully rendered.
But the positions of
the stars are accurate.
It was printed in 1515, and
there aren't many of them left.
Some of the few that survived have
been colored in, like this one,
to make it look even more exciting.
But I actually prefer
the black and white,
because it's almost
like a treasure map.
It's all promise of things to come.
And the Southern sky turned
out to be really different,
and not just the question of
filling in the blanks on this map,
but discovering that the air
down there was clearer and drier,
and there was less
light to get in the way.
Light was already interfering
with observations
of Northern observatories.
So the Southern sky offered
something truly different.
And there were objects
in the Southern sky
that had no counterpart
in the North.
And that really made the
difference in being able
to track distances across space.
So also in 1515, Ptolemy's
star charts were published.
They weren't pictorial
like Ptolemy's geography.
They were really instructions,
lists of locations.
And these were widely used.
He had 48 constellations.
We have 88 today.
But he described the positions
of each very carefully
in this list format.
And this is the first
real star atlas.
It was by Alessandro Piccolomini,
and it came out in 1540.
And the unusual thing about it
is that there are no pictures.
It's just the position of the
stars, which are quite accurate.
And he also had a technique for
showing which stars were brighter,
this convention of drawing
the brightest stars larger
than the others.
So this is the Uranometria of Bayer.
And it is one of the most
magnificent star atlases
ever published.
It was the first truly great one.
It's beautifully illustrated.
And the really -- one of the
most unusual things about it is
that it contained this map of the
stars of the Southern Hemisphere.
So these are new constellations that
were discovered by Dutch traders
on their way to the East Indies,
and Bayer incorporated
them into the map.
And he also had two little
cloud-like objects here and here,
which were the clouds
that Magellan noticed.
And they are today called
the "Magellanic Clouds."
And we know them now as satellite
galaxies of the Milky Way.
But at the time, their
nature was not understood.
So again, you can see
the magnificent artwork,
how beautifully things --
the pictures are rendered.
But more importantly, the
star positions are accurate.
Bayer had all the information
from Tycho Brahe.
What he did not have
yet was a telescope,
but this was the most
up-to-date information.
And for most people, suddenly being
able to see new constellations
in the Southern Hemisphere, this
must have been quite a shock.
So no talk about star
charts would be complete
without something from
Solarius from 1660.
Again, this is the Southern
Hemisphere, lots going on,
magnificent color, but
not really an improvement
over what was known
in the earlier ones.
I don't have the -- there we go.
So this is Edmund Halley.
You usually see him as an older
man with a great long white wig.
But when he was very young,
when he was about 20 years old,
he hadn't even finished college,
he took it upon himself to travel
to the island of St.
Helena to map the stars
of the Southern Hemisphere.
And he used a telescope.
In the North, Flamsteed, the first
astronomer royal at Greenwich,
was making careful
maps with a telescope,
and Halley had observed a little
bit with him, and wanted to be able
to bring in the Southern stars.
And he was very excited.
He knew there was going to be a
solar eclipse, a lunar eclipse
and a transitive Mercury.
What he didn't count
on was St. Helena.
The weather was terrible.
He got maybe an hour a night
when he could really observe.
But he did discover
more than 300 new stars.
So he published his
findings himself.
But they really didn't get spread
around until Hevelius
published his Firmamentum.
And you can see that on the left.
And the funny thing about this --
you notice they look
like mirror images.
That's the Bayer on the
right, and the Hevelius
on the left, which is more accurate.
But the reason they look like
mirror images is because they are;
because Bayer looked up at
the stars from the Earth,
and Hevelius took a God's eye view,
as though the stars were
printed on a celestial globe.
So they mirror each other.
And this shows Halley's new work.
But the next big advance
wasn't until the 1750s
when the French astronomer La Caile,
went to South Africa and made a --
had much better weather,
and made a very careful map
of the Southern skies,
and introduced another
14 new constellations.
And here they are in color.
So you can see some of the names.
Because rather than --
there were plenty of maps,
plenty of ancient heroes in
the skies, plenty of dragons.
You don't have to say, "Here
be dragons" on star charts,
because the skies are full of them.
But you can see he
named Telescopium,
and Microscopium, and Horologium.
So this was a new list
of heroes in the sky.
I'm definitely getting
the hang of it now.
Okay; so here's La Caile on the left
with his 14 new constellations,
and Bayer on the right.
So you can see, things are
getting really crowded.
And it's starting to be difficult
to fit in all those pictures.
This is Johannes Bode's
Uranographia.
This came out in 1801.
So it's a 200-year time span
from the Bayer, 1603, to this.
And the -- it's a colossal book.
And the renderings are magnificent.
And again, it's the latest
word in accuracy of position.
And it's really the last
atlas that took that kind
of trouble with the illustrations.
And by the next one, which is
Argulander [phonetic] in 1843,
you can see the pictures now,
they're just a little sketch.
The stars are the more
important thing.
And there start to
be these outlines,
which is the way the constellations
are depicted on modern star charts,
just the outlines of
the stellar territory
that each constellation takes up.
And an American astronomer, Benjamin
Apthorp Gould, was the person
who decided to make a very
thorough map of the stars
of the Southern Hemisphere with
all the most modern approaches.
And he was a difficult personality.
He'd been fired from one job,
and didn't get another one.
But his work on the Southern
stars was truly excellent.
And it didn't look like
the earlier catalogues.
You get charts like this, which
are giving exact positions,
apparent magnitudes of the
stars, and kind of a diagram
from the perspective
of the South Pole.
So Argulander's book was 1877.
In the 1880s, photography
really started to reach a point
where could be useful
to astronomers.
At first, the wet plates, people
tried, there were a few photographs
of stars made, but it
was very difficult,
and you couldn't do long exposures.
I'm cheating a little because
this is a photograph from 1952.
But you get the sense of
how much more shows up.
Because once you can do a
long exposure photograph,
the light can just accumulate on the
plate, and stars that are too faint
to show up even through the
most powerful instrument
and the most skilled
observer looking through it,
will register on the
photographic film.
And this possibility was what
inspired Edward Pickering
at the Harvard College
Observatory to really commit himself
to a program of all sky photography.
He likes to say he was
inspired by his younger brother,
who was teaching photography at MIT.
But there had also been
an astronomical event,
the Comet of 1882,
which was observed
from South Africa by David Gill.
And Gill was desperate to
take pictures of this comet.
And he borrowed a newspaper
person's camera,
and literally just strapped
it on the telescope.
And not only did he get
good pictures of the comet,
but people were dumbstruck by the
quality of the background sky.
So this really looked
like a way to improve
on the painstaking measurements
being made all through the night
by practicing astronomers.
And because Pickering
wanted the entire sky,
he built a satellite
observatory at Arequipa in Peru.
And he had a phenomenal
knack for attracting money.
And much of his project was paid for
by two heiresses who were interested
in astronomy, Anna Palmer Draper
and Catherine Wolfe Bruce.
And Miss Bruce put down --
wrote him a check for $50,000
to buy the big telescope he wanted
for the observatory in Peru.
So Pickering sent one
of this favorite people,
Solan Bailey [phonetic], to run
the observatory at Arequipa.
And Bailey got fascinated
by these objects.
Again, this is a modern photograph.
But this is a globular cluster.
Astronomers are very pedestrian
the way they name things, you know,
"Big Bang," "globular cluster."
It looks like what it sounds like.
And this is a giant
beehive of stars.
And one of the things Bailey
tried to do, he and his wife,
he would take these pictures, and
then they would put a grid over it,
almost like a latitude and
longitude grid, and they would try
to count all the stars in
each of these pictures,
and also assess their brightness
relative to one another.
The other thing they
photographed were spectra.
So this is an image
taken with a prism
at the far end of the telescope.
And so instead of seeing
little dots of starlight,
you're actually seeing
the spectra of the stars.
And the black splotch
there is a penny.
It's just to give you
a sense of the size.
And Pickering was very
forward-thinking.
He hired mostly women to
analyze these photographs.
So he has telescopes
now, both hemispheres,
working all through the
night every clear night.
And the glass plates were
accumulating by the thousands.
And no matter how many
people he hired,
they never really got all
the information they could
from the plates.
But it was a whole new effort
at mapping, and also at looking
at the spectra to see what could
be learned about the stars.
You know, up to this
point, astronomy,
feller [phonetic] astronomy was
all about position and navigation.
Now, something -- because
of spectroscopy,
something physical could be learned.
And Mrs. Draper's husband, Henry,
who was pioneer in the field said
that spectroscopy had made
the chemist's arms millions
of miles long.
So these are two of the most
accomplished, most famous ladies
in the group that would sometimes
referred to as "Pickering's Harem."
So in the white dress
is Annie Jump Cannon.
And when she came to
the observatory in 1996,
she was assigned the bright
stars of the Southern Hemisphere,
and to look at them individually,
and to try to perfect a
classification scheme.
Stars -- the spectra came
in different varieties,
and what did that mean, and
how could they be grouped?
And the women standing next to
her is Henrietta Swan Leavitt,
and she looked at the
photographs of the stars
and studied the way the variable
stars changed their light.
So here are some large spectra.
When Miss Cannon was looking at
the spectra of the bright stars,
they were greatly enlarged.
And she came up with a system.
She was the third woman
at the observatory
to work on creating a system.
But her system is still
in use today.
So if you take an astronomy class,
you learn that the major types
of starts are O B A F G K M. And the
mnemonic for remembering that is,
"Oh, be a fine girl, kiss me."
[Laughter] And nowadays people
say, "Oh, be a fine guy, kiss me."
But it all comes down to Miss
Cannon's plan, which had started
out being in alphabetical order.
But as more was learned about
the spectra and the stars,
she saw a reason to fiddle
with the alphabetical order.
And one of the things that came
out of the classification was --
this is a famous diagram
in astronomy.
And it plots the temperatures of
the stars against their sizes.
And the classification turned
out to have everything to do
with the temperatures of the stars,
which no one knew at the beginning.
They weren't really sure
what was causing the spectra
to look different from
one category to the next.
And it turned out to be temperature.
So here's Miss Leavitt working
at her desk at the observatory,
looking at these images, following
the way the stars changed brightness
over time.
So she's got some photographs
that are taken hours apart,
days apart, months apart.
And she -- because she was
interested in variable stars,
she found a great number of them
-- let's see if that's my next one,
in those Magellanic clouds that
showed up in the early maps.
Here they are.
This is -- oh I'm sorry about that.
The modern star maps aren't
all that exciting to look at.
But you can see where
those clouds are.
Here is an actual -- this is
one of the Harvard plates.
So this is the small
Magellanic cloud.
And she was looking at this one.
Oh, there's one of those
globular clusters again.
And this is the large
Magellanic cloud.
These are other notations.
People studied the plates
for all sorts of reasons,
and they often wrote
right on the glass surface
in different colors of ink.
These plates are now
being digitized.
So the markings have to be taken off
before the plates can be digitized.
And so this plate no longer
exists; it's been swiped clean.
So as she was looking at the
variable stars in those two clouds,
she noticed something
truly extraordinary.
She did -- all the stars in each
of the clouds were the
same distance away.
And yet the -- so whatever
stars looked brighter actually
were brighter.
They didn't look brighter in the
cloud because they were closer.
All these stars were
the same distance.
So she could trust that the
brighter ones really were brighter.
And she was looking
at variable stars.
So she made the astounding
observation
that the brighter stars
took a longer time to cycle
through their pattern of variation,
and that you could actually tie
a time period to a brightness.
And she followed this carefully for
about 25 stars, and it held true,
and she was able to graph it.
And her work was published.
And with that information,
other astronomers were able
to calibrate a distance scale.
Because if you could find that kind
of star now anywhere in the heavens,
you knew from its time period
how bright it really was.
And if it looked dimmer than
it was supposed to look,
it was farther way, and you
could actually calculate how much
farther away.
This is Harlow Shapley, who took
over from Pickering at Harvard.
This was Pickering's
fantastic round desk.
It managed to get about 25
feet of tabletop in a circle.
And he could just spin it around,
have different projects
at different stations.
It's really a great invention.
And then the bookcase in
the middle also revolves.
And Shapley had been inspired to
look at the globular clusters.
Even before he came to
Harvard, he worked at one
of the new big telescopes on
Mount Wilson in California.
And he looked at all
the globular clusters
that were all around the Milky Way.
And he realized that they were --
they formed a ring
around the Milky Way.
And where the sun is, where
the yellow, that's the sun.
And it quickly became clear to him
that the sun was nowhere near
the center of the galaxy.
The center was where the red X is.
And he had great fun publishing this
to take humankind down
a few notches.
The way he put it was, "Man
is not such a big chicken.
You know, we're really not
at the center of things."
Miss Cannon actually
got to go to Peru
and make her own observations
of the Southern stars.
And she was really thrilled about
that, because as a young woman
when she first came to the
Observatory, she had studied them
without ever having seen them.
So it was a great thrill
for her to be down there.
She was close to 60 when she went,
and she had tremendous stamina.
She walked and rode horseback
all day, and then stayed up
and did her astronomy and said she
had to force herself to go to sleep.
So this is Edwin Hubble
riding a telescope.
And Hubble didn't agree
with Shapley.
Shapley thought that
the Milky Way Galaxy was
so enormous the way its size had
increased with an understanding
of a distance scale,
that it probably constituted
the entire universe.
And that the other blurry
spirally-looking things
that could be seen in the sky
were not really other galaxies
like the Milky Way, they
were just little nebulae.
And there was a great debate
on this topic that lasted years
in the astronomy community, "Was
the Milky Way Galaxy the extent
of the universe, or was it just
one of billions of galaxies?"
Edwin Hubble was looking
at the Andromeda Nebula,
which is a neighbor of the Milky
Way, and he was able to identify one
of Miss Levitz's [phonetic]
variable stars.
And from the distance to
this nebula, he could prove
that it was not inside the
Milky Way, and that indeed,
it was its own comparable galaxy.
And that really changed
the way people have looked
at the heavens ever since.
And later, Hubble was also the
person who looked at these objects
and noticed that the
farther away they were,
the faster they were moving.
They could tell the movement of
the galaxies by their spectra.
If the light was shifted
very far toward the red,
they were moving away.
And that was how an understanding --
how astronomers came
to an understanding
of the expansion of the universe.
So the Southern Hemisphere today
is still the best place to go.
This is the European
Southern Observatory.
They have their telescopes in
the Atacama Desert in Chile.
And one of the Times reporters
recently described it as saying,
"You almost feel that the stars
are tangled in your hair."
On Earth, of course, we have
space telescopes now because even
from the high desert in Chile,
there is air to contend with,
and air is always jiggling the
view through the telescope.
But now that astronomers have
this new technique called
"adaptive optics," they
can use laser light.
They actually almost
paint the star on the sky,
and then they can be adjusting the
mirror of the telescope by fractions
of a millimeter in milliseconds,
and can get views, earthbound views,
that are really comparable
to views from space.
So I'm happy to tell you that some
of the art is coming
back into the science.
This is actually a painting.
Remember this, it's the
small Magellanic cloud.
So this artist, Lia
Halloran, in Los Angeles,
shares my fascination
with the Harvard women.
And she is doing an art
installation that will open
in Delaware next spring using
the plates they examined,
but turning them into artworks.
So she paints the stars first,
and then she covers the sheets
with a photosensitive material,
and puts them out in the sun,
and creates -- and
these are gigantic,
they're about six feet square.
This is a very scientific map.
This is the work of
astronomer Andrea Ghez.
And the astronomers are busy
putting the monsters back
in maps of the stars.
What she and her team have
discovered these are stars near the
center of the Milky Way.
And they've been watching
these stars orbit the center
of the Milky Way.
And there is a uncanny
speed to these motions,
far more than anyone theorized.
And the only explanation is
that there is something massive
at the center of the galaxy;
massive but invisible.
And in their wonderfully descriptive
way, astronomers call it a
"super-massive black hole."
[Laughter] And this
object is estimated
to be four million times
the mass of the sun.
And it was there all the time.
[Laughter] I think I'll
end with that picture.
If we have time for questions --
[ Applause ]
>> John Hessler: And you do you have
some time for questions if we --
>> Dava Sobel: Yes.
I cannot see the audience, though.
>> How many different positions
across the Southern
Hemisphere did you need to get
to see the entire [inaudible]?
>> Dava Sobel: How many
different positions did they need
across the Southern Hemisphere?
They really could do with one,
because the Earth cooperatively
turns.
So you just have to get
the Southern latitude,
and then you get the whole sky.
So they started in Peru, and
then they lost the weather.
They were there for --
until about the 1920s,
and then they moved to South Africa.
The weather, which was notorious at
first -- people would get down there
and were just astounded
at what they could see.
And they would almost hope for bad
weather so they would have time
to make repairs, or take a rest.
But it was just great
night after night.
So the total plate -- this
went on for a hundred years.
So there are a half
a million plates,
and they're all still at Harvard.
And they are -- as I said,
they're being digitized
because the information
content has not been scratched.
And the star position plates
are still very valuable.
And it's a unique collection.
>> I'd like to know a
little more about the women,
what kind of education, were
they well-paid, respected?
>> Dava Sobel: The women
at the very beginning,
they mostly had a high
school education.
At the very beginning, of course,
they were the family members
of the astronomers,
wives, sisters, daughters.
But they did a really good job.
And that opened the way
for other women to come in.
But also at that time right around
the time photography was coming in,
the women's colleges were started.
So schools like Vassar and
Smith became feeder schools
to the Wellesley, to the Harvard
Observatory, and Radcliff too.
And so the women were
college-educated.
Well paid, no.
Was it -- no it was never thus.
They were never well-paid.
But their work was valued.
They were -- everything they did
was published; they got their names
on everything; they were members
of astronomical organizations.
It was a happy story.
>> If you want to trace the history
back to the 16th century, you had --
let's say -- you had
observations with the naked eye.
>> Dava Sobel: Yes.
>> You then had telescopes, which
showed obviously a lot more stars.
And then you finally
had photography,
which would show basically
an infinite number.
My question is when they moved from
the naked eye to the telescopes
on those charts that you've
observed, did the number
of stars increase dramatically?
Do they continue -- do they start
showing the very finest ones?
>> Dava Sobel: Oh, yes.
Oh, the number increased.
And so each project
had its own system.
First you would try to ascertain
whether the star you were looking
at appeared in some catalogue,
or if it was really a new one.
And if you couldn't find it
in any of the catalogues,
then you would give it a new number.
And you would list
it in your catalogue.
>> But the more powerful
the telescope,
the more you could see, obviously.
>> Dava Sobel: Yes; and
the longer the exposure,
the more you could see.
>> Sure, sure.
One other quick question, the most
famous Southern constellation,
let's say to navigators,
is the Southern Cross.
I don't think I saw the Southern
Cross on any of your diagrams;
or maybe I just missed it.
>> Dava Sobel: I'm not sure how
well it shows up on any of these.
>> Can you talk a little bit
about how the illustrations
of the constellations
were developed?
You said that they were [inaudible]
the ideas and the illustrations?
>> Dave Sobel: Well, all of that was
inherited from the ancient myths.
So those constellations
had names from antiquity;
and names like Orion, or
Hydra, the water snake, Gemini,
all the zodiac constellations.
They were handed down
from ancient times.
And it was up to the person
creating the calendar,
doing the artwork, to render them.
And they didn't always
render them the same ways.
So you might be looking up at
the sky or down from the sky.
They might be more or less ornate.
The figure might be shown
from the front, or the back.
People had a lot of
freedom with the pictures.
The important -- and
in the beginning,
the pictures were more important,
and the stars were
dotted in at random.
Then the positions of the
stars became more important,
and the pictures had to uphold that.
And then the pictures just
faded from importance.
But they were imaginative renderings
from ancient well-known
stories, Perseus, Andromeda.
>> Even for the new constellations
that were being discovered
[inaudible]?
>> Dava Sobel: No; for
the new constellations,
they would make up new things.
For instance, Halley made
up a new constellation
for Charles, with an oak.
And then, La Caile would
name constellations
for scientific instruments.
The constellations that the Dutch
traders devised were mostly birds.
Maybe they were birds they had
seen in the Southern Hemisphere.
But if you are the
first one who sees it,
you get to say what you
think it looks like.
And then that's how it remains.
>> Did the invention
of the chronometer
by John Harrison influence
mapping of stars?
>> Dava Sobel: Well, the chronometer
helped people find their position
at sea.
And if you remember the story,
the chronometer was in competition
with the learner distance
method, which relied totally
on accurate maps of the heavens,
and was the reason observatories
were built, to map the heavens
for purposes of navigation.
So when the astronomers
came -- began mapping --
continued mapping stars
with precision time
instruments, they needed that.
They needed to be able to
time their observations.
They didn't have to have
something quite so portable.
But an observatory always had an
extremely accurate clock that was
as important as the telescope.
>> We can go with one more.
>> I have the power.
[Laughter] Is a constellation
defined by a set of criteria,
or is it just a human thing?
>> Dava Sobel: I'm
sorry, is it defined by --
>> An objective set of criteria?
>> Dava Sobel: An objective set
of criteria; absolutely not.
No; and different cultures
have different constellations.
It's really -- it's like
an ink blot in the sky.
And then certain things stuck.
The one that really looks
like what it is to me --
I don't know if anybody else
agrees, but Orion, the hunter,
when you look up, it really looks
like a figure of a guy with a club.
It just really looks like it.
Whereas Aries, the ram,
[laughter] it just --
how they got a ram out of
those -- yes, it's a mystery.
>> I have a question, with your
soon-to-be published book I'm
wondering whether you are
engaging at all with students
and personal interests, because
my niece is studying astronomy
at Tufts.
And astronomy, I think,
still is underrepresented
in terms of girls and women.
And it's sort of a downward
slide from biology, to chemistry,
to physics, and the math-related.
And I'm wondering if you're
intersecting with that community
with the stem in education,
particularly now
with the intersection of
astronomy and cartography
that you're talking about,
and if you could comment
on your perspective of education and
inclusion of women in this arena.
>> Dava Sobel: Well, I certainly
hope to be talking to students,
and I -- because the book
is so much about women.
I had an interesting experience,
I asked one of the
Harvard astronomers --
at Harvard women are
underrepresented
in the astronomy faculty.
But among the graduate
students, it's almost 50/50.
So I think you'll be
happy to hear that.
And I had asked one of the
astronomers there, one of the women
to be one of my technical
expert readers.
And she was so excited.
She said, "I always
thought these women,
that it was just kind
of a cute, quaint story.
I didn't realize they
actually did science."
So even being at Harvard
somehow it wasn't widely known.
Whereas if you go to Wellesley,
and you mention the
name Annie Jump Cannon,
everybody knows what she did.
So this will be an
interesting journey.
>> John Hessler: Well, the book
is called "The Glass Universe,"
be out in December, correct?
>> Dava Sobel: Yes.
>> John Hessler: I want
to thank Dava for coming
and giving such a great talk.
>> Dava Sobel: Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> John Hessler: Thank
you very much.
It's great.
[ Applause ]
And I want to thank
you all for coming.
Tomorrow morning, the new librarian
of Congress will be
introducing the conference.
We will then have some
representatives
from the Galileo Museum in
the Library of Congress.
And we will be launching our
new Walter E. Mueller website
to the world.
We will also be having a talk
after that by Elmer Eusman,
who is the chief conservator here
at the Library, who's going to talk
about the complicated conservation
issues, and the physical studies
that were done at the
Walter E. Mueller materials,
and what they've taught.
So I hope to see you tomorrow.
Thanks very much for coming.
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.
