Many of modern astronomy’s achievements can be traced back to relatively unknown women who painstakingly cataloged the stars in the early 1900s.

Called the Harvard Computers (because they performed calculations), these women combed through thousands of photographic plates of stars and cataloged them. That’s like being given massive stacks of photo albums and having to manually find and identify every picture of a particular person.

While learning about stars and the cosmos is endlessly fascinating, staring at those plates must have been very tedious work.

But more than 100 years later, the field of astronomy is where it is today in part because of the influence of these trailblazing women, including Henrietta Swan Leavitt.

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