Caroline Herschel: Scientific Cinderella to Comet Sweeper

Caroline Herschel, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2014

Happy birthday Caroline Herschel! German-born Caroline Herschel (16 March 1750 – 9 January 1848), while overshadowed by her brother William (who discovered Uranus, amongst his other astronomical accomplishments), was a real pioneer as a woman in astronomy and made her own important contributions. In fact, she became the first salaried female scientist, when King George III hired her to assist her brother, at a time when there were few professional scientists anywhere. Hers was a real life sort of Cinderella story, where rather than marrying a prince, she made a life and career for herself. Marriage was the expected role for a woman of her time, but she was deemed unmarriageable, since a childhood bout of typhus stunted her growth. Her mother thought she should train to be a servant, and purposely stood in the way of her learning French, or music, to prevent her from seeking employment as a governess. She wanted a perpetual unpaid maid. Her father sometimes managed to include her in William's lessons when their mother was absent. William had fled to England after the Seven Years War and made a life as a musician and composer in Bath. William managed to rescue his younger sister from their mother's clutches, under the pretext that she might have the voice to be a solo singer in Handel's oratorios, as she too was a natural musician. Of course, he also wanted a woman to manage his bachelor household. Meanwhile, he developed a real passion for astronomy. So, by the time she arrived, all his spare time away from music was devoted to astronomy and she found that despite her singing talent, she was roped into assisting with the construction of telescopes, rather than receiving music lessons. By 1781, William had discovered a new planet - Uranus , which he cannily dubbed the 'Georgian Star' after King George III. This had the desired effect of securing himself a pension, so that he could spend his time on astronomy (so long as he would present it to the King when asked).

William and Caroline worked together at Slough, observing the night sky with a variety of telescopes. William built some very large telescopes and had Caroline take notes of what he observed, while she used smaller 'sweeper' telescopes to sweep the skies for interesting object. She discovered 11 nebulae (2 of which turned out to be galaxies) which were previously unknown! She also found 8 or 9 comets, as well as making and sharing observations of comets discovered by others. The portrait is based on a miniature of Caroline, as well as her own notes and diagrams from 1 August 1786, when she discovered her first comet, now known as Comet C/1786 P1 (Herschel). On the left, her sketches of the object "like a star out of focus" which she correctly identified as a comet, is at the centre of the three circular diagrams labelled I, II and III. On the right, her Fig I and Fig II show her observations the following night, noting the position of the comet relative to the constellations of Ursa Major and Coma Berenices.

She also independently re-discovered Comet Encke in 1795, first recorded by Pierre Méchain in 1786. Later, in 1819, her observations help Johann Franz Encke recognize it was a periodic comet, like Halley's comet. Encke was able to calculate its orbit, partially due to her observations. The comet shown behind Caroline is based on a recent photo of Comet Encke, which returns every 3 years.

In order to calculate orbits of newly discovered comets, it was important to let other astronomers know as soon as possible. The letter post was often not fast enough, if the weather turned cloudy. She discovered her 8th comet while her brother was away. So, she took matters into her own hands. After an hour's sleep, she saddled a horse, and road the roughly twenty-six miles to the Greenwich Observatory of the Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, much to his astonishment.

One of her important impacts on astronomy was that her early success showed her brother how even an amateur using a small telescope could find previously unobserved nebulae, and hence that there was real value in making systematic sweeps of the night sky. Partnering together, with William sweeping the sky with his 20 foot telescope and Caroline taking notes by lamplight just inside the window, they went on to discover 2507 nebulae and clusters over two decades of work. Further, she acted as 'computer', doing the mathematical grunt work for her brother's observations. William's study completely revolutionized astronomy, and it couldn't have happened without Caroline's help.

They worked side by side nightly until 1788, when William married (at age 49). Caroline was no longer needed to run his household, and he offered her money as compensation. She, however, convinced him to request her own salary from the King, which she received. She moved to a cottage in the garden. She did a lot of her own observing for the next nine years (while William was otherwise occupied at nights), and gained more fame in her own right.

In 1797 the standard star catalogue used by astronomers was published by John Flamsteed. It was tough to use since it appeared in two volumes, with discrepancies. William suggested that a proper cross-reference would be a great help and a project for Caroline. She produced the resulting Catalogue of Stars, published by the Royal Society in 1798. It contained a index of all of Flamsteed's observed stars, all of the errors in his volumes and a further 560 additional stars.

When William died in 1822, she returned to Hanover, where she was born, but she continued her cataloguing and confirming of William's observations. Her catalogue of nebulae aided her nephew John Herschel in his astronomical work. The Royal Astronomical Society presented her with their Gold Medal in 1828 for this catalogue. She was the first woman to receive the honour (and remained the only woman until Vera Rubin in 1996).

She and Mary Sommerville were the first women admitted to the Royal Astronomical Society, when they were elected Honorary Members in 1835. In 1838 she was elected an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin. In 1846, at age 96 she also received a Gold Medal from the King of Prussia, for her astronomical work (presented by none other than Alexander von Humboldt). An asteroid and moon crater have been named in her honour.

You can find more in the great article  on Caroline Herschel by Micheal Hoskin AAS Comittee on the Status of Women site (to which this blog post is indebted), Caroline Herschel's wikipedia entry,  and the ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY entry on her notes.

Time Series

As a scientist most of the data I work with is time series data (personally, I've worked with things like accelerations of the seafloor as a function of time both due to earthquakes and not, pressure as a function of time, electric fields as a function of time and so forth). I've found that the concept of a 'time series' is allusive for students, though it can be quite simple. A time series is a collection of measurements made (hopefully) regularly in time, like: a list of daily temperatures, marks in a doorway of a family's children's height every year, sheet music, records of a stock's daily price, records kept by many modern cars of speed as a function of time. There's a whole field of study (time series analysis) with tools for plotting, studying and milking these types of data for all their worth. The simplest, most fundamental and perhaps paramount thing though, is simply to show these data. This can be particularly challenging, if for instance one wants to show motion (position as a function of time) of two or three dimensional things - and is something which clearly interests artists as well as scientists. I've gathered some interesting and beautiful examples, both data visualization and fine art.

Here's a time series of the sort I know well, as a geophysicist.

Luke Jerram. Source: theboulevardiers.com via minouette on Pinterest

Tōhoku Japanese Earthquake interpreted as Sculpture, by artist Luke Jerram.

"To create the sculpture a seismogram of the earthquake, was rotated using computer aided design and then printed in 3 dimensions using rapid prototyping technology." Because seismic data is actually 3D, I rather wish he had taken the vertical and the absolute value of horizontal, rather than just rotating the vertical to make this shape, but I do find that making the seismogram in 3D gives it a sort of solidity that can be lacking in a line plot. He's taken a similar approach with his 'Crash! Glass Stock Exchange Sculptures', using raphs of the New York Stock Exchange (Composite 2004-2012) and the Dow Jones (Industrial Average 1980-2012) to make us thing of the current state of world finance and its impact on people.

Luke Jerram. Source: lukejerram.com via minouette on Pinterest

If you are unfamiliar with his work, you must really go look at Luke Jerram's sculptures, particularly his amazing glass viruses.

Source: richworks.in via minouette on Pinterest

The Crayola time line rapidly communicates not only the rate at which crayon colours have been added (2.56% annually, apparently Crayola’s Law states: The number of colours doubles every 28 years), but which specific colours have been available at in any year from 1935-2010.

  Louisa Bufardeci, Source: louisabufardeci.net

'13 captured telephone conversations - all one minute long' (2006)
machine embroideries, each 13 x 18 cm/5 x 7 inches

Australian artist Louisa Bufardeci often works with data, including time series data. She's embroidered sound intensity as a function of time in '13 captured telephone conversations - all one minute long' above, and 'Every second is like, forever, and every year is like 11.3 centimetres' below.

Source: louisabufardeci.net via minouette on Pinterest

 Every second is like, forever, and every year is like 11.3 centimetres (2007)
embroidery floss, fibreglqass screen, each 50cm wide, lengths variable

Harold N. Fisk. Source: visualnews.com via minouette on Pinterest

This map produced in 1944 by Harold N. Fisk, is a sort of time series of the 2D shape of the lower Mississippi, in a rainbow series of colours to represent its placement as the mighty river changed course and flooded over time.

Annelie Berner. Source: itpabb.tumblr.com

Annelie Berner, a graduate student at the Interactive Telecommunications Program in NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, has created this lovely light shade using a laser cutter to print temperature anomalies since 1850 on leaves which she sculpted into a light shade. "The cutout circles are big when there were big shifts, small with small shifts in temperature. Temperature anomalies mean that leaves age, color, and fall in different ways than they do during average temperature years." So, by employing the leaves as a medium she's speaking to how temperature anomalies can impact our world.

Undulations of the fins of a skate viewed from the side, Étienne-Jules Marey, 1894 Source: lushlight.tumblr.com via minouette on Pinterest

Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) may be best known as a chronophotographer, like Eadweard Muybridge, but he also worked  in physiology, cardiology, physical instrumentation, aviation and  cinematography. The Victorian photographic method of chronophotography, which captures motion in several photographic frames is a wonderful means of showing a times series of motion of people and animals (and will be the subject of my next post). Marey's illustration of the undulations of a skate ray is acts like chronophotography, with time as the vertical axis, and truly demonstrates how skates move. This method influenced other diagrams.

Source: publicdomainreview.org via minouette on Pinterest

Olympic Diving Diagrams (1912) Diagrams showing the trajectory of the major dives as performed at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. (All images taken from The Fifth Olympiad: the Official Report of the Olympic Games of Stockholm 1912 housed by the Internet Archive, donated by the University of Toronto).

Adrien Segal  takes an "interdisciplinary approach that integrates scientific research, data visualization, aesthetic interpretation, and materiality, [his] work seeks to reconcile scientific conventions of reason and fact with an intuitive sensory experience...  interpret[s] the complexity of natural systems by translating scientific data into lines, shapes, forms, and materials to reveal trends, patterns, processes, and relationships as three-dimensional sculptures."

Adrien Segal. Source: http://www.adriensegal.com/

"Tidal Datums is a wooden table whose form is inspired by the formal language of data graphics. The table is intended to be a representation of analytic information through the medium of furniture. Data graphs were gathered from NOAA’s historic tide database, more specifically the measurements of tides at San Francisco Bay over a 4 week period, and then translated into tangible material."

Christiane Keller has created a number of fascinating sculptural works which are spatial and temporal data visualizations.

Christiane Keller. Source: christianekeller.de

"A 3D data sculpture of the Sunday Minneapolis / St. Paul public transit system, where the horizontal axes represent directional movement and the vertical represents time. It is constructed of 47 horizontal layers, each forming a map of the bus routes that run during a given interval of time. Within each layer, every transit route that operates at that time is represented by wood balls placed at its scheduled stops, connected by the horizontal copper rods."

 Annika Syrjamaki weaves time series data including stock and weather data into fabric, making beautiful fine art textiles!

Annika Syrjamaki. Source: fastcodesign.com via minouette on Pinterest

Political party data

Annika Syrjamaki. Source: fastcodesign.com via minouette on Pinterest

Word frequency data

For more, see also the magpie&whiskeyjack post on Sculpting Data and Painting Time Series and the upcoming post on Chronophotography.