In the 1880s, Edward Charles Pickering, the director of the Harvard College Observatory, started amassing what would eventually become the world’s largest collection of photographic plates of ...

The computers were mainly hired by Edward Charles Pickering, who was director of the observatory from 1877 to 1918. According to Smithsonian magazine, Pickering expanded astrophotography shortly ...

Edward Pickering and his female assistants, known as the “Harvard computers.” Image from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics In 1881, Edward Charles Pickering, director of the ...