ADELAIDE AMES was a twentieth-century lady astronomer full of the awesome. She completed her un

ADELAIDE AMES was a twentieth-century lady astronomer full of the awesome.

She completed her undergraduate education at Vassar College before graduating from Radcliffe College (the first woman at Radcliffe to receive an M.A. in Astronomy!) in 1924. While at Harvard, she and Harlow Shapley worked together to complete the Shapley-Ames catalog, which listed galaxies brighter than the 13th magnitude and whose data challenged the assumption of the universe’s isotropy.

At the age of 32, Ames drowned in a boating accident. Her friend and fellow astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin remembered her as “young, lovely, and intensely vital” and “the closest friend [she] ever made at the Observatory.”[1]

[more on Ames here andhere]