Even before the publication of Longitude twenty-five years ago, I learned about a group of women who worked at the Harvard College Observatory in the nineteenth century, analyzing images of the stars to fantastic effect.
These ladies of “Pickering’s harem” aroused my curiosity, but I put them off while pursuing Galileo’s Daughter, exploring The Planets, and turning Copernicus’s idea for A More Perfect Heaven into a stage play called And the Sun Stood Still.
Viking published The Glass Universe in December 2016. The official “launch” took place in the old observatory building, among the half million glass photographic plates still treasured by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. A Penguin paperback edition followed in 2017. Continuing the theme of women in science, I’ve taken up a new project with the working title In Madame Curie’s Lab.