The Boy Whose Head Was Filled with Stars: The Inspiring Illustrated Story of How Edwin ...
(World News Science)

“We do not know why we are born into the world, but we can try to find out what sort of world it is.” In 1908, Henrietta Swan Leavitt — one of the women known as the Harvard Computers, who revolutionized astronomy long before they could vote — was analyzing photographic plates at the Harvard College Observatory to measure and catalogue the brightness of stars when she began noticing a consistent correlation between the luminosity of a class of variable stars and their pulsation period, between their brightness and their blinking pattern. At the same time, a dutiful boy cusping on manhood was repressing his childhood love of astronomy and beginning his legal studies to...