In the 1870s, the Harvard College Observatory director was frustrated with his staff, and would often say “My Scottish maid could do better!” When he hired her officially in 1879, Williamina Fleming proved he had been right all along.
She spent two years doing astronomical clerical work, then in 1881 Pickering invited Fleming to formally join the Harvard Collage Observatory and taught her how to analyze stellar spectra. She became one of the founding members of the Harvard Computers, an all-women group of human computers hired by Pickering to compute mathematical classifications and edit the observatory’s publications.
Williamina ran an astronomy team for decades, publishing a classification system of tens of thousands of stars, discovering a total of 59 gaseous nebulae, over 310 variable stars, and 10 novae. One of her most famous discoveries (among astronomers, anyways) was the Horsehead Nebula in 1888.
