Publisher's Synopsis
Women have often been discouraged from pursuing careers in science, no matter their level of interest or aptitude. The women depicted in this coloring book defied the odds and forged ahead with their studies, sometimes working with their fathers, brothers, or husbands in order to gain access to resources in the field of astronomy. From the days of ancient Greece, when Aglaonike was deemed a sorceress for predicting eclipses of the moon, to the late nineteenth century, when women began performing calculations as human computers, to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when women traveled into space, women have made important contributions to the study of the heavens. In the early twentieth century, Annie Jump Cannon refined the Harvard classification scheme, the basis of the system used by astronomers and astrophysicists today. In 1967, graduate student Jocelyn Bell Burnell found the first evidence of a pulsar. When NASA introduced electronic computers to calculate astronaut John Glenns orbit around the Earth, he refused to fly unless Katherine Johnson had personally verified the calculations by hand. Biographies about these and nineteen other astronomers or astronauts are included on the facing pages of the drawings for you to color. The illustrations and text were created by Tasha Gross, a New York artist with a passion for astronomy and science. Images
