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More than 100 years ago, Harvard astronomer Edward Charles Pickering decided he was going to take a picture of the entire night sky. Or, rather, many thousands of pictures, each capturing a tiny rectangle of the universe as seen through a telescope. Today, these photos survive on hundreds of thousands of glass plates at the Harvard College Observatory, the oldest comprehensive record of the cosmos.
Though it was Pickering’s idea, the actual work of studying these photographs was done by a group of women known as the Harvard Computers. Before the days of silicon and circuits, actual humans performed the laborious mathematical endeavor of physics and astronomy.
