Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who revolutionized our understanding of what stars & the Universe are made of, was born #OTD in 1900.
In 1926, she wrote what is considered the "undoubtedly most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy".
She continued in the same spirit - only to be denied a professorship (or even the a proper astronomer position). She finally became a professor at Harvard at 1956(!) & first woman to chair a department.
Want to know what my research is about? Follow this thread 🧵 based on a 10min talk I've drawn for a meeting.
The talk was aimed at non-specialist space science colleagues (not the general public!). The slides were built up step by step, but I'm omitting this here & showing only the final graphs, less this becomes a 34-part thread. 11 is plenty enough!
So: "Understanding Winds of Massive Stars Using High Mass X-ray Binaries"
Happy birthday to chemistry trailblazer Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier (20 January 1758 – 10 February 1836), wife and collaborator of French scientist Antoine Lavoisier (26 August 1743 – 8 May 1794).
The Lavoisiers, working closely together, modernized and quantified chemistry and the scientific method, recognized and named oxygen and hydrogen, explained the role that oxygen plays in combustion, 🧵1/n
Happy birthday to trailblazing American computer scientist Frances Elizabeth Allen (1932 – 2020) who made foundational contributions to optimizing compilers, optimizing programs and parallel computing. She was the first woman to become an IBM Fellow, where she worked from 1957 to 2002 and as an emeritus fellow afterwards. She was the first woman to win the Turing Prize.
1/16 This July, I gave an invited talk in the "Communicating Science Through Art" session at the European Astronomical Society annual meeting, organized by the amazing @theastrophoenix . And I thought it may be something that would also interest you #fediverse folks.
The aim of the talk was partly to give people insight into my why & how of my art. But mainly to encourage others to just try. In a very subjective manner.
Happy birthday to #astronomer Vera Rubin (neé Cooper, ‘28-‘16) & her discovery that angular motion of galaxies deviates from predictions, 1st evidence for dark matter, now known as 5x as common as matter & the stuff which dictates dynamics of galaxies & evolution of our universe! Nobel committee waited 3 years after she died to reward another for the theory of dark matter.
She found 6 months mat leave post MSc very difficult being
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Watercolour. A thin intrusion of mafic basalt running through felsic Lewisian gneiss. The two rock types, with their different mineral content, have strikingly different lichen communities. From Raasay, NW Scotland. A second, and probably final, sketch of this - I have some other interesting rocks to try...
Art progress: 2023, 2015 and 2013 (I didn't do any art until 2020 after that)
I was going to spend more time on the new one but I think it looks okay as is :)
I'm pretty proud of it so any boost is appreciated :p I was super proud of the 2015 and 2013 ones too! Hope this can inspire people to keep making progress 😊
Happy birthday to Danish #seismologist Inge Lehmann (1888 – 1993) who demonstrated that the Earth's core is not a single molten sphere, but contained an inner solid core, in ‘36. She was a pioneer #womanInScience, a brilliant seismologist & lived to be 105.
As she first postulated, the #earth has roughly 3 equal concentric sections: mantle, liquid outer core & solid inner core. 🧵1/n
We are celebrating Christmas at partner's parents with the same raclette grill as 20 years ago - which is pretty impressive, but not quiet as much as the Voyager spacecrafts 😅 Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977 - still working, still teaching us new things about the most external parts of the solar system.
With many thanks to @schnedan for the idea to draw Voyager :)
For #ArtAdventCalendar Day 10: Happy birthday to Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), who published the first computer program. She worked together with Charles Babbage, the inventor of the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine (the first - analogue! - #computers), correcting his notes on how to calculate Bernoulli Numbers with the Analytical Engine. 🧵1/n
Today is also International Crow and Raven Appreciation Day and I for one, appreciate the corvids. They are extraordinarily intelligent birds! Here is my murder of crows, part of my #termsOfVenery series of collective nouns for animals series of prints.
The raven is the official bird of the Yukon, in my print with the official flora, fireweed.
Lastly my crow print, inspired by a photo my husband took.
Happy birthday to Charles Darwin (1809-1882)! Today is Darwin Day to celebrate his birthday, science and evolution.
“The inhabitants believe that these animals are absolutely deaf; certainly they do not overhear a person walking closely behind them. I was always amused, when overtaking one of these great monsters as it was quietly pacing along, to see how suddenly,
I'm a multi-disciplinary designer out of work due to #LongCovid. Recently I have been visualizing and raising understanding of post-viral illness with my project ILLMARKS.
Happy birthday to #astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979), trailblazer for women in #astronomy who discovered that hydrogen and helium are the most common elements in the universe.
Born England, she won a scholarship to Newnham College Cambridge in 1919 where she heard a lecture which changed her life. She wrote, “My world had been so shaken that I experienced something very like a nervous breakdown.” 🧵