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Welcome to stuff you missed in History Class, A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson. And I'm Holly Fry. A couple of months ago, we got a pile of listener requests for an episode on Cecilia Payne The Passion.

She was an astronomer who made a lot of firsts, including being the first person to figure out that stars are made of mostly hydrogen and helium. Usually when we get a whole bunch of listener requests, one right after the other, I can figure out what prompted them. Like, usually there was a Google doodle or there's a viral post that circulating around this time. It was kind of a mystery because there is a new biography that came out earlier this year, which is Donovan Morse, what stars are made of, which is beautiful.

I recommend it. And there have been some viral posts, but none of this lined up with when we got this pile of requests. And then on top of that, when I tried to go through our inbox so I could make a list of all the listeners that I wanted to thank here at the top of the episode, I found nothing, zero emails. I remember them coming in, yet I could not find them. Honestly, though, this feels like just a mysterious gift from the universe, because by the time I got to this end of the research for this, I just loved Celia Pinkwashing.

I don't love the sexism she faced that we're going to talk about. But like her whole story, I really delighted in. She grew up in a society that just did not prioritize education for girls and that regarded women's academic ambitions as suspect. But her determination and her creativity at getting around that just was so delightful to me. So that's what we're going to talk about today.

So Cecilia Payne was born in Wendover, England, on May 10th, 1900. Her father, Edward, was a barrister and a historian, and her mother, Emma, was an artist. Cecilia was the oldest of Edward and Emma's children with a younger brother, Humphrey, and a sister, Leonora. From a very early age, Cecilia was curious and imaginative, with a keen memory and sharp observation. Their home was full of music, art and literature, and they had a large library.

They were a pretty comfortable middle class family. They had enough money to afford household help, and that allowed Emma to keep working as an art copyist, even when her children were still really small. But that changed after Edward Sudden death when Cecilia was four. Edward had married Emma somewhat later in life, and he died the day after Christmas 1984. At the age of 60. His body was found in a river where he had apparently drowned.

He had been experiencing some heart trouble and some dizziness, which may have contributed to his death. But it's it's just not clear exactly what happened. Although Emma received a widow stipend after Edward's death, it really didn't match what his income had been and money was a lot tighter. Even so, Emma tried to make sure that her children were immersed in culture. She would scrape together enough to travel and attend concerts and go to museums. The children's upbringing also wasn't always conventional.

When Cecilia asked for a bedtime story, her mother read her The Odyssey. When Emma decided Cecilia was too old for story, Cecilia started by telling herself stories at bedtime before moving on to making up bedtime stories for her younger sister.

Cecilia was really bright and driven to learn. When she started school, she had some struggles. The teachers at the little school across the street from their home, which she was attending. They encouraged her. But Cecilia was also left handed, and they taught her to write with her right hand. This really deeply frustrated her. So she taught herself to be more ambidextrous and to do things like write upside down using techniques and exercises from a pamphlet that her great grandfather had written.

That pamphlet was called Painting with Both Hands.

I know so many people who were natural lefties that were forced to write right handed and it was never delightful for anybody. No, I my preschool teachers kept telling me to put the pencil in the hand that felt most comfortable in. And I was like, I don't know what you're talking about. So I just imitated what the other children were doing. And I like I to this day, don't know if I really should have learned to write with my left hand.

And that's why my penmanship has been terrible my entire life. Or maybe my penmanship is just terrible for my entire life.

You know, everybody scribbling. My dad was a lefty that was pushed to right handedness in his penmanship has always been a little bit fraught, looking like it always looks stressed.

Yes. But when Cecilia was eight, she was out in the family's orchard when she spotted a bee orchid growing in the grass. She recognized it not because she had seen one before, but because her mother had described one to her once and when she convinced her mother that yes. There really was a bee orchid growing out in the orchard am I had the gardener transplanted to a better location. And after this experience, Cecilia decided that the one thing she wanted to do was study nature and science.

It was a few years before she could really do that, though. When Cecilia was 12, the family moved from Wendover, which was a little more rural, surrounded by woods and hills to the Bayswater neighborhood of London. They moved there for the sake of her brother Humphrey's education to give him access to a better public school. Cecilia was enrolled in a parochial school called St. Mary's. That school was really not a good fit for Cecilia, though a big part of her school day was religious instruction, which really did not interest her so much so that she would pretend to faint to try to get out of going to chapel.

She also tried to get a bookbinder to make her an addition of Plato in a Bible cover so that she could read classical philosophy during her religion classes. Unfortunately, that brilliant plan was thwarted because the bookbinder said no to it. Yeah, apparently the bookbinder was appalled by that very suggestion. On top of all of that, girls who truly wanted to learn and who excelled at school were viewed with a lot of suspicion when Cecilia, who was in the youngest class, came in second out of the entire school in a year end exam.

She wasn't praised for her performance. The other students were scolded for allowing her to beat them. Classes for girls were also mostly focused on reading and writing, not on the subjects that Cecilia felt a real passion for.

Cecilia turned to the family library to try to make up for what she saw as huge holes in her education. And while she did love theatre, opera music and literature which were all represented there, what she really wanted to study was science. And there were almost no books on science on the family shelves. She finally found one book on botany, but it was in German and French, which she did not speak. So she got a dictionary from school and laboriously translated that book into English.

She turned to this kind of resourcefulness again and again during her education, including, for example, transcribing an entire textbook from the library by hand before she started at Cambridge because she could not afford to buy a copy of her own.

Eventually, the teachers at St. Mary's started to get really tired of Cecilia's persistence at demanding to study science and to be more challenged in her schoolwork. In addition to trying to teach herself outside of school, she was essentially badgering her teachers into tutoring her in other subjects than the ones that the school offered. Finally, somebody told her that the only way she might be able to study science was as part of training to become a school teacher. So she volunteered to teach Sunday school classes to try to prepare herself, although she focused her Sunday school, teaching a lot more on science than on the Bible.

Today's lesson dandelions. What Cecilia spent years as St Mary's butting up against all kinds of barriers to the education that she wanted for herself. And that, of course, was frustrating and exasperating for everyone involved. Teachers and administrators saw her behavior is inappropriate and disruptive. And when she was 17 and had just a year left to go, she was expelled.

However, it does seem that the headmistress of St. Mary's wrote a letter encouraging St Paul's Girls School, which had been established by the Worshipful Company of Mercers to allow her to enroll there for her. Last year, St Paul's was far more focused on the academic success of its students than St.. Mary's had been. And once she got there, Cecilia was finally encouraged in her pursuit of science, and she excelled in other courses there as well, including polishing her skills in public speaking and studying music, which was actually being taught by Gustav Holst, who was not a famous composer.

Yet when Holst finished his orchestral suite that's known as The Planet's, Cecilia was actually one of the students who got to hear a performance of it.

That is the coolest. Later on, Cecilia Payne Aposhian wrote in her autobiography that the first time she walked through the door at St Paul's, she thought, quote, I shall never be lonely again. Now I can think about science. She finally had the freedom to really pursue her ambitions. And one of those ambitions was to go to Cambridge, which we'll talk about after a sponsor break. I'm Shonda Rhimes. If you watch Grey's Anatomy or any of my TV shows, you know, I love to tell a good story.

Well, now there's Sandland Audio. We've partnered I Heart Radio to launch a slate of great podcasts. You can listen to the first four right now, Katie's Crib Criminal. You go Ascoli and you down and we have so much more coming your way, we can't wait for you to hear it all. Welcome to Shadowland Audio. Listen to all the new chandeliered audio shows on Apple podcasts.

Although Cecilia Payne really thrived in the year that she spent at St. Paul's, she still had a huge amount of catching up to do if she wanted to go to the University of Cambridge.

It wasn't just the challenge of getting into school there. She could only afford to go if she got a scholarship. And aside from her self-taught knowledge of botany from that book, she translated herself out of the dictionary. She was way behind in all the sciences and in math, but she devoted herself to catching up. And in the end, not only did she get into Cambridge, but she also scored well enough on a competitive exam to earn the only scholarship that was big enough to cover all of her expenses in full.

Cecilia started at Newnham College, which is a women's college at Cambridge in 1919. Getting into Cambridge, though, did not mean that she had left behind the kind of sexism that was such a big part of her earlier education. Newnham is a women's college, and it had strict rules for students behavior, from standards of dress to curfews to a ban on male visitors. There were also specific rules for Newnham students when they attended lectures or other functions at other Cambridge colleges.

And even though all the students at Cambridge were meeting the same academic requirements regardless of their gender. Only men were actually awarded degrees. There were also expectations about which courses women should take. There wasn't really a barrier to studying the natural sciences in general. But in the first part of their time at Cambridge, women studying the natural sciences were expected to focus on botany. Botany was like the women's science student selected to other subjects to go along with that primary focus.

And the companion courses for botany were typically zoology and chemistry. So if a woman wanted to study science at Cambridge during this time, it was just generally understood that she would start out studying botany, zoology and chemistry.

Well, of course, because ladies like flowers and animals, correct.

In spite of Cecilia's childhood experience with the Bee Orchid and her self-taught study of botany, by this point she was really a lot more interested in chemistry and physics, at the same time trying to make either of those. Her primary course of study seemed incredibly risky, given how shaky her earlier instruction in these subjects had been and in the math that was required, which she was also behind on and in the uphill battle she would face as a young woman pursuing either of these subjects.

So she initially chose to study botany and chemistry as expected, but she added physics to that rather than zoology. But on December 2nd of 1919, Cecilia Payne had an experience that completely shifted her focus, much like the discovery of that Bee Orchid had when she was a child. This time it was a lecture by Arthur Stanley Eddington. Eddington had been part of an expedition to view the total solar eclipse that took place on May 19th of 1919. And that expedition was to measure how the sun's gravity affected light from stars.

We talked about that expedition in our twenty seventeen episode on historical eclipses. The data gathered during this eclipse supported Einstein's theory of general relativity, and Cecilia was absolutely captivated by this lecture.

She later wrote, quote, The result was a complete transformation of my world picture. When I returned to my room, I found that I could write down the lecture word for word.

At about the same time, Cecilia was also starting to question her choice of studying botany. Most of the material that she was hearing in lectures was already familiar to her, but at the same time she was so inexperienced at the more practical side that she made mistakes that caused her to doubt herself. After Eddington's lecture, she really wished she could change her focus to astronomy. But that was flatly impossible. Astronomy was classified under math, not under natural science, and students could not jump into a totally different course of study that way.

So she changed her main focus from botany to physics. And since students were allowed to attend lectures outside their particular field of study, she also went to astronomy lectures and spent as much time at Cambridge Observatory as she could with the help of astronomer L.J. Comrie. She also repaired the clock at Noonamah Small Observatory and started spending her evenings there, making observations and recording data. At one point, she ran into Arthur Eddington again at Cambridge Observatory and told him that she wanted to be an astronomer.

When he realised how set she was on this idea and how much study she had already done on her own. He recommended some journals that she could use to continue her studies and also told her that she could use the Cambridge Observatory Library. As all of this had been happening, debate had been ongoing about how women's education should work at Cambridge, and on October 24th, 1921, the Cambridge Council of the Senate voted that women would be granted titular degrees from the university.

This was better than the previous setup, which was that women who completed all the requirements of the degree were awarded nothing. But it also meant that women were to be given the title of the degree, but not the degree itself. This sparked outrage mainly from men who objected to women being acknowledged at all.

In early 1923, Cecilia Payne was getting toward the end of her study at Cambridge, and she had spent those years dividing her time adding as much astronomy as she could to her study of physics and natural sciences. She had learned from luminaries like Niels Bohr, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work with Adams in 1922. She also studied computing, including joining the computing section at the British Astronomical Association, and she had been elected to the Royal Astronomical Society while still a student as well.

She had done all this while facing derision and resentment not just from her male peers, but also in some cases from the faculty. At lectures, women were required to sit in the front row by themselves. She described how at the start of his lectures, Ernest Rutherford would very pointedly begin.

Ladies and gentlemen, she'd also come to understand that she just had no future as an astronomer. If she stayed in England because of her sex, the only path that was really open to her was still becoming a schoolteacher. L.J. Comrie offered to take her to a lecture that Harlow Shapley, who was director of the Harvard College Observatory, was giving in London. Comrie could introduce the two of them and then maybe that would open a door for Cecilia to continue her education in the United States, where she might have more opportunities than she did in the U.K..

This worked. Paine told Shapleigh directly that she wanted to come to Harvard to work for him. Shapleigh encouraged this idea, casually suggesting that she might replace Annie Jump Canon, Harvard Observatory's curator of astronomical photographs. When she retired. This was more of a reflection on the roles that women filled at Harvard rather than an actual job offer.

Yeah, it was the sort of like offhanded, hey, maybe you could be Annie's replacement. Because obviously a woman does that job and a woman would do that job. Anyway, just as going to Cambridge had required Cecilia to gain admission and also to get a scholarship, going to Harvard also required her to secure some funding. Otherwise she just would not have the money to do it. On February 26, 1923, she wrote to Shapleigh about trying to get a fellowship.

She also got recommendations from Arthur Eddington, L.J. Kamari and her old headmistress at St. Paul's. It really seems like she got a recommendation from every conceivable person that could give her one. C also applied for as many scholarships and fellowships that she could to try to scrape together enough money to afford her passage across the ocean to buy appropriate clothing and to pay for her living expenses while she was there.

And once again, she was successful as she prepared to leave England. Astrophysicist Edward Arthur Milne suggests that if he were in her place, he would take advantage of the wealth of data available at Harvard to verify an equation that astrophysicist mignons Sahai had developed in 1920. This equation expressed the relationship between a star's pressure and temperature and the ionization of the elements in the star. We'll get to what she did with that after one more sponsored break. Cecilia Payne left Cambridge, England for Cambridge, Massachusetts in September of 1923, her fellowship at Harvard College Observatory gave her the freedom to choose the focus of her research.

And as Emily had suggested, she started studying photographic plates of the spectra of stars to try to confirm his equation, to make sense of what she was doing.

All the way back in 66, Isaac Newton used a prism to separate sunlight into a continuous series of colors, using the word spectrum to describe what he saw. Later, William Wollaston and Joseph Fraunhofer each observed that if you looked at the Sun spectrum in fine enough detail, there were dark lines within that spectrum. These became known as Fraunhofer lines or absorption lines. But Fraunhofer did not have an explanation for what those lines were or why they were there.

Then in 1855, Robert Bunson built on earlier designs to develop the Bunsen burner. The Bunsen burner produced an almost colorless flame, and that made it useful for studying the light that was produced by heating or burning different elements. Not long after, Gustav Kirchhoff suggested that they could use a prism to separate this light into its spectrum that would make it easier to distinguish the find differences in flames that have really similar colors. This was an early version of the spectroscope.

Through this work, Kosoff discovered that each element had its own unique set of spectral lines when it was heated, almost like a fingerprint. We talked a little bit about this when we talked about the discovery of helium. Mm hmm. Emission lines come from the wavelengths of light that elements emit when they're excited, and absorption lines appear when wavelengths of light are absorbed in between when they're produced and when we observe them. Today, we know that the presence of these lines relates to the structure of the atom and what happens when atoms are excited to different levels of energy.

But at the end of the 19th century, physicists and astronomers knew that these spectra existed, but they didn't quite know what they meant. At Harvard College Observatory, astronomers started using these spectra to classify stars. Wilhemina Fleming, who had been the housekeeper of observatory director Edward C.. Pickering, developed a classification system that was primarily based on the strength of the hydrogen lines in these spectra and jump cannon later simplified and refined this system into one that still exists today.

The types O, B, A, F, G, K and M often put into the mnemonic. Olby, a fine girl, kissme that was purportedly coined by Henry Norris Russell. There are also a few other classifications that can be added into that mnemonic and some other attempts at mnemonics that are less gendered, relying on the idea that like you want a woman to kiss you, maybe whether she's really up for that or not, that includes only bad astronomers.

Forget generally known mnemonics, but as was the case with Fraunhofer, discovery of absorption Spectra Cannon didn't really have a sense of why stars fit into these categories or what those categories meant. She was cataloguing, not analyzing or interpreting. But the observatory did have more than 200000 photographic plates documenting star spectra organized into these categories, thanks to the work of William Mina Fleming and Jump Canon and other women at Harvard Observatory.

I have a. jump cannon on my list for a future episode just in case folks are like, I wish you had an episode on any jump canon. After getting to Harvard, Cecilia Payne got to work examining these plates through a jeweler's loop, she worked with an intense and unshakable focus, sometimes going days without sleep, chain smoking the whole time, rarely remembering to empty the ashtray. A lot of accounts of her office talk about the like, overflowing ashtray.

Eventually, she realized that she was seeing four different organizations of silicon represented in the spectra on the plates.

This ultimately led her to the discovery that the variation she was seeing among these spectra were coming from different levels of ionization of the elements that were involved based on the star's temperature, not on actual differences in the amounts of elements that were present there through all of this work folded into sawhorse equation, pain gradually came to understand that all the stars had roughly the same proportions of 18 different elements with hydrogen and helium being most abundant.

However, this was totally contrary to the theories of the day. Most astronomers and physicists at the time were working from the principle of uniformity that all the planets and stars were made of the same elements, that Earth was in about the same proportions. And while there were a few elements that did have similar proportions to what was found on Earth, she discovered that helium was 1000 times more abundant than expected. And hydrogen, which we now know is the most prevalent element in the universe, was a million times more abundant.

So pain had always been ambitious. But she also realized that it was possible that she had not just discovered something that would completely rewrite our understanding of the stars, that maybe she had just made a mistake. Like it's a shorter walk to I made a mistake than I have just discovered something that fundamentally changes our understanding of how the universe works. So she painstakingly went through her work over and over, trying to figure out where she had made an error and she could not find one because she had not made one.

She was right. At this point. Harlow Shapleigh was trying to transform Harvard Observatory into a department of astronomy at Harvard. He convinced Paine to use her findings to write a thesis which would allow her to earn the first Ph.D. in astronomy ever to be awarded at Harvard University. At first, Paine doubted that this would be worth her time, but she ultimately agreed.

However, some of the people who were involved with reviewing and approving the thesis doubted her conclusions, in particular, Henry Norris. Russell, whose work hinged on the principle of uniformity, demanded that she allow for the possibility that she was just mistaken. Her thesis included the caveat, quote, The outstanding discrepancies between the astrophysical and terrestrial abundances are displayed for hydrogen and helium, the enormous abundance derived for these elements in the stellar atmospheres is almost certainly not real. Russell would not have accepted Paines thesis without this concession, so if she hadn't included it, she wouldn't have had a thesis at all or been awarded a Ph.D..

So including this couching was a pragmatic decision. This wasn't something that she brooded over, but it was something she regretted. And she would later say, quote, as a warning to the young, If you are sure of your facts, you should defend your position, even with its downplaying of the most revolutionary of her findings.

In 1962, Auto's Dhruva and Belton's Zebra's called this thesis, which was published under the title Stellar Atmospheres, a contribution to the observational study of high temperature and the reversing layers of stars. They called it, quote, undoubtedly the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy. It was also the first monograph ever to be published by the Harvard Observatory.

Cecilia Payne was awarded a PhD from Radcliffe College in 1925, as Harvard itself did not yet award degrees to women. Harlow Shapleigh had thought her work was so obviously profound and worthy that after she took her final oral exam for her PhD, he didn't tell her she had passed. She only found out after astronomer Margaret Harwood found her weeping inconsolably in her office, thinking that she must have failed. I want to time travel and hug her.

I want to time travel and yell at Harlow Shapleigh. Well, I feel like, though his thing was to me, he was just thoughtless. Yeah. He was like, obviously you passed how it was. Anyway, eventually the field of astronomy did come to realise that Payne's conclusions about the compositions of stars and the abundance of hydrogen and helium in the universe were correct. This included Henry Norris Russell, who acknowledged that fact in nineteen twenty nine.

The completion of her PhD meant that Payne no longer had fellowship money to live off of, so she started looking for a job. She got offers from other observatories and universities, but she also. At least stayed at Harvard, where she was hired as Harlow chaplain's assistant, this didn't pay very much and she had to pawn some of her belongings to make ends meet in the gap between when her fellowship ended and when her job started. But it was enough for her to move out of the dorm and into her own apartment as long as she had a roommate.

Being chaplain's assistant also meant that Payne no longer had the freedom to choose the research that she wanted to do. And at first Shapleigh had her keep working with photographic plates of stellar spectra, even though there was more sophisticated technology becoming available. By that point, she was also expected to teach courses for the newly established Department of Astronomy at Harvard, although since she wasn't technically on the faculty, her name was not included in the course catalog. Her students described her as very intense, sometimes intimidating, and her lectures were both beautiful and memorable, even though she was not being paid or recognized accordingly.

Shapleigh was definitely aware of what an asset pain was. In one letter, he described her as, quote, one of the most outstanding astrophysicists of America of any and all sexes. In 1926, she also became the youngest person to be listed in American Men of Science. She became a U.S. citizen in 1931. Then in 1932 and 1933, Cecilia Payne experienced a series of tragedies. Her closest friend from Harvard was astronomer Adelaide EAMS. The two of them were so close that they had been nicknamed the Heavenly Twins.

Adelaide drowned after being swept from a canoe during a sudden storm in 1932.

While at Cambridge, Cecilia had been similarly inseparable from her friend Betty Leif, and they had remained very close in the years that had followed. Cecilia learned that Betty had also drowned in 1933, as she later wrote in her autobiography, quote, Adelaide and Betty All that. I was not beautiful, delicate, beloved, were dead and I was alive. I was absorbed in my work, shy and unattractive. What was I giving? I made a silent resolve.

I would open my heart to the world. I would embrace life. She decided to travel, making a trip to the Pocono Observatory outside St. Petersburg.

During that trip, she also went to an astronomical conference in getting in Germany. And there she met Sergei Pushkin. Copaken was from Russia. His parents and most of his siblings had died during a typhus outbreak and at the end of the Russian civil war, had left him with no money and no documents that could prove his identity. Eventually, he had made his way into Germany, where he had earned a Ph.D. in astronomy. But Hitler's rise to power put him in a really impossible situation.

He was a Russian living in Germany without any papers. Kropotkin, travel by bicycle for four days to get to get an for this conference with the hope that one of the other astronomers there could help him get out.

And the person who helped him was Cecilia Payne. She got Harlow Shapleigh to offer him a position at Harvard and to contact the American consul in Germany to try to get cooperation out of the country. After she got back to the United States, Cecilia personally went to Washington, DC to try to get his visa expedited.

In 1934, three months after Sergei arrived in the U.S., he and Cecilia got married. Most of her colleagues were baffled. It did seem quite sudden, but in a lot of ways their marriage really made sense. Both of them were dedicated astronomers, and Sergei was also an artist at the time. It was expected for women to leave the workforce after getting married. But Sergei was a refugee and his temporary job at Harvard paid even less than Cecelia's did.

If they got married, that meant that he would be dependent on her income to survive. There would be no possible way for her to just leave the workforce because she was a married woman.

Now, in other ways, it made less sense. Over time, Sergei developed a reputation for being opinionated and hard to work with, and he openly flirted with other women in the observatory. He was a capable astronomer, but Cecilia was brilliant. In some accounts, Harvard tolerated his rough edges just to keep Cecilia there.

Between 1935 and 1940, they had three children Edward, Catherine and Peter. And Cecilia broke with convention yet again by continuing to teach while she was pregnant. Since they couldn't afford child care, they pretty much brought the kids with them to work. Cecilia and Sergei also started doing research together, publishing a book on variable stars in nineteen thirty eight. That same year, the American Astronomical Society awarded Cecilia Payne Karpovsky in the first ever Annie Jump Cannon Prize, which still exists today and recognizes outstanding post-doctoral research by a woman.

Also in nineteen thirty eight Pain Depression was finally named to the Harvard faculty with the title of astronomer. In the summer of 1939, Sergei and Cecilia traveled to Paris for a conference in spite of the growing tensions in Europe. But Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington was also going to be at this conference, and Cecilia wanted the chance to see him again. This actually turned out to be her last opportunity to do so. He died in 1944. Germany invaded Poland just days before Cecilia and Sergei arrived back in the U.S. aboard a ship, the French vessel called the SS Normandy.

Cecilia and Sergei continued to work at Harvard during and after the war. Cecelia's name was finally included in the course catalog starting in 1945. In 1956, she became the first woman to be a tenured professor at Harvard, and soon after she was also the first woman to chair a department that wasn't specifically for women. At this point, her salary was doubled, but her children were still a fixture around the laboratory. The Harvard Observatory Council formally warned Peter, the youngest, to stop bothering the staff in nineteen fifty eight.

She was away when the meeting happened, when they had this discussion and was outraged about it. It's very embarrassing. And she was also like, he's old enough for you to be talking directly to him about these issues anyway. During her career as an astronomer, Cecilia Paying Aposhian published more than 150 papers and several monographs, as well as multiple books on astronomy, in addition to the one we mentioned earlier, this included the stars of High Luminosity in 1930 and variable stars and galactic structure in 1954.

In 1976, she was awarded the Henry Norris Russell Prize, which is essentially a lifetime achievement award by the American Astronomical Society. And a nice irony, considering his earlier appearance in this story.

Cecelia Payne got. Bashkim died of lung cancer on December seven, 1979. Her daughter published her autobiography, The Diaries Hand, along with other collected writings in 1984. Today, there is a portrait of Cecilia Payne Aposhian hanging in the faculty room in Harvard's University Hall.

It is in the style of Vermeer 668 painting the astronomer, and it was painted by Patricia Swartwood.

We will end with a quote from Cecilia Payne. Copaken quote, There is no joy more intense than that of coming upon a fact that cannot be understood in terms of currently accepted ideas. Nature has always had a trick of surprising us, and she will continue to surprise us. But she has never let us down yet. I love her. I do, too, she's marvelous, and I'm so glad you picked this one. I'm so glad that mysterious people asked for this a couple of months ago.

And now I can find no record of it.

Maybe maybe someone will write and explain where they thought. Like what?

Maybe what Facebook group or Twitter thread or whatever it got brought up on that. Got so many people excited about her story.

Yeah, I tried several different searches to try to try to like try to find the emails. I tried just Cecillia, I tried Aposhian, I tried her whole name. I remember specifically somebody said, can you do an episode on the woman who discovered helium? And I was like, I don't think that's quite right. Quite what. But I'd like and I like just searching helium. I also didn't find it was just a whole big mystery anyway.

Do you have listener mail that is less of a mystery? I sure do. It is from Meg. Meg says, Hi, Tracey and Holly. I'm behind in my podcast Listening and I've been marathoning to catch up as an amateur gardener and food fermenter. I was delighted when I reached the August 19th episode about the invention of Canning. At the end of that episode, you encourage listeners with the resources to do so to donate canned and dry goods to local food pantries.

I would like to offer an alternative for anyone who cannot contribute monetarily or from their own pantries. Food Rescue. I volunteered for several years with a local organization called Food Link, which partners with grocery stores and bakeries to get excess inventory and fresh produce into the hands of community members who are food insecure. In a nutshell, stores donate food to us. We make sure everything is that safe temperatures and hasn't spoiled. Then we distribute boxes of food to organizations serving at risk youth, seniors and families who may not have access to fresh food.

There are similar food rescue groups all over the U.S. and probably worldwide. And there are lots of ways your listeners can help if they can't donate food or money. For a few examples, it's late in the season, but some fields have leftovers aren't profitable to harvest. Can you work with the farmer to glean that field and get that produce to people who need it? Maybe your local food rescue just purchased a building to turn into an operation center and are working on retrofitting it for freezers and shelves.

You have graphic or interior design skills that you can volunteer to help make signs or optimize sorting spaces. Boxes are always running out or following a park. You ask for banana boxes that your supermarket might be throwing out or crushing. The covid-19 pandemic has been isolating and soul crushing in a lot of ways, and volunteering in food rescue has allowed me to remain connected to my community. It gets me out of the house for fresh air and physical activity. And because we have to meet all food preparation regulations, it's a very safe environment for some social interaction.

Digging through mesh bags to pull out rotten oranges isn't glamorous, but it doesn't put me at risk of not being able to pay rent. I can't recommend it highly enough for anyone who wants to help others but can't make a material donation. Thank you for taking the time to read this email and thank you and all of the missed in history family for the hours of education you've provided. I've been a listener since the Candice and Josh days and I definitely everyone involved at least one cup of coffee.

May we keep each other safe, healthy and sane. Meg, thank you so much for this email.

Meg, the one food bank I have actually volunteered at does a lot of this food rescue. So in my head, all of that was kind of folded together into one thing. My job was sorting the unbroken eggs out of the egg cartons.

Someone else's job was done then doing this thing called egg candling, where they would like examine the egg through a light to make sure there weren't any cracks in it that were not visible to the, you know, the unaided eye anyway. Yes, there are so many ways to contribute, even if you don't really have, like, either the money or the the, you know, canned goods to contribute to a food bank. My recommendation is always to, like, contact the food bank and see what they need.

Yes. Whether it's a food rescue organization or like a food pantry that's just getting the the resources to people. Some places are are way more able to do more with money than with the canned goods donations. So, like, that's the thing. You know, I would hate for somebody to take a bunch of a bunch of boxes. And then it turned out that that's not something that particular food pantry. And so, like, my my guideline is always check in, see what kind of donations are going to help the most.

There are definitely a lot of places that need some volunteer help that are still doing volunteer intakes in a in a safe and socially distanced way during the pandemic. So there are lots of options out there for people who do have time, but maybe not money or or goods to donate. Yeah, I want to say, first of all, I adore Myg. Like for. Just the great detail, like it's perfect and it's a good reminder and to like this is so timely because we are heading into the holiday season and it's getting colder.

Yeah, people like the needs are only going to increase right now. They're not going to to we're not getting to a place where things are better and it's less urgent. It's more urgent than ever.

Yeah. Yeah. For sure. For sure.

So thank you so much, Meg, for this email. Thank you to all of our listeners. We have gotten so many gracious emails from folks over the last several months. Again, we keep saying this. We really, truly mean it. We hope people are able to stay as well and safe.

And and I I don't know is as good as possible. There's so much happening in the world right now. So anyway, thank you again to everyone, especially for writing this email.

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