Caroline Ellen Furness

Caroline Ellen Furness (1918)

Caroline Ellen Furness (born June 24, 1869 in Cleveland , Ohio , † February 9,  1936 in New York , New York ) was an American astronomer .

Life

Caroline Ellen Furness was the daughter of high school teacher Henry Benjamin Furness and Caroline Sara Furness nee. Baker. Her scientific interests were encouraged at home, but it was only against the opposition of her widowed father and sister that she could begin studying astronomy at Vassar College  in Poughkeepsie . There was mainly Mary Watson Whitney her teacher, the first year even Maria Mitchell . She graduated in 1891 and then taught at schools in Connecticut and Ohio . She also attended math courses at Ohio State University .

From 1894 to 1898 she assisted Mary Watson Whitney at Vassar College in teaching the meanwhile 160 students and in observations at the college's observatory. Encouraged by Whitney, she then began a doctoral degree at Columbia University in New York with Harold Jacoby . After successfully defending her dissertation A Catalog of Stars within One Degree of the North Pole and Optical Distortion of the Helsingfors Astro-photographic Telescope, Deduced from Photographic Measures in 1900, she was the first woman to receive a doctorate in astronomy from Columbia University.

She returned to Vassar College, where she became an instructor in 1903 and an associate professor in 1911. After Whitney's retirement in 1913, she had full responsibility for astronomy at Vassar, and in 1915 she was appointed Maria Mitchell Professor of Astronomy and Director of the Vassar College Observatory. In 1908 she worked for a semester with Jacobus C. Kapteyn  at the University of Groningen . In  1918/1919 she traveled around the world on a sabbatical and visited numerous astronomers and observatories.

Services

Caroline Furness dealt with comets and asteroids , but especially with variable stars . She was a volunteer variable observer under Edward Charles Pickering at the Harvard College Observatory and was a founding member of the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) in 1911 . In 1915 she published the book An introduction to the study of variable stars , which quickly became the standard work and made Furness an authority in the field. As a professor at Vassar College, she trained numerous women astronomers. She encouraged her students to study variable stars and, among other things, made it possible for them to take part in AAVSO meetings. In general, the education of young women was important to her.

Furness was represented on numerous committees. In 1922 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society  .

Works (monographs)

• An introduction to the study of variable stars. Houghton Mifflin company, Boston and New York 1915
• Manual of practical exercises in astronomy. Edwards brothers, Ann Arbor 1933

literature

• Thomas R. Williams: Furness, Caroline Ellen. In: Thomas Hockey et al. (Ed.): Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers , Springer, New York 2014, ISBN 978-1-4419-9916-0 , pp. 767-769. doi : 10.1007 / 978-1-4419-9917-7_489
• Maud W. Makemson: Caroline Ellen Furness. In: Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Volume 48 (1936), pp. 97-100. doi : 10.1086 / 124662
• Maud W. Makemson: Caroline Ellen Furness. In: Popular Astronomy, Volume 44, pp. 233-238. bibcode : 1936PA ..... 44..233M
• Obituary Notices: Fellows: Caroline Ellen Furness. In: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 97 (1937), pp. 272-273. doi : 10.1093 / mnras / 97.4.272

Web links

• Publications by Caroline E. Furness in the Astrophysics Data System
• Caroline E. Furness in the Vassar Encyclopedia