Page seven of the photo album for the 4th Conference of the International Union for Solar Research, 1910. Left to right are: Frank Schlesinger, Isabella Fowler, Williamina Fleming, and Aloysius Laurence Cortie sitting and resting on Mount Wilson.
Page ten of the photo album for the 4th Conference of the International Union for Solar Research, 1910. Williamina Fleming is third from the right among the group of photographers on Mount Wilson.
Images courtesy of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science Collection at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California
Catalogue’ s Harvard Standard Sequence( O, B, A, F, G, K, M) for the classification of stars. 26 This consensus would lead to the worldwide adoption of the principles that Fleming had begun developing at the start of her scientific career, back in 1881. It remains the standard by which stars are classified today.
That important conference included many social outings, as noted in the written records. 27 There is, however, another record: a scrapbook of photographs taken during the conference and compiled by J. S. Plaskett. One shows Fleming sitting under a tree with Frank Schlesinger, Mrs. Isabella Fowler, and Aloysius Laurence Cortie. 28 She is dressed in a dark, ornately pleated and layered Edwardian dress, accompanied by an equally grand hat topped with ribbons and flowers. The more telling image is a larger group photograph, capturing a gathering of the mostly male attendees, all fidgeting with or setting up their own cameras. 29 A man in the center of the image has a large-format camera on a tripod and looks ready to capture a subject out of view. On the right, you can spot three women, Fleming among them. The two unidentified women have cameras and are clearly taking part in this photography expedition. In fact, one of the most famous astrophotographers of this era, E. E. Barnard, is blocking our view of what Fleming might be holding in her hand. Perhaps a camera of her own.
Fleming died within a few months of returning from California, at the age of 54. She did not live to see the publication of two more scientific articles in her name.
Fleming rests in Lot 6188 along Maple Avenue at Mount Auburn Cemetery. She lies within the Garrett family lot— William Warren Garrett, an MIT friend of her son Edward, later married Fleming’ s niece Ida. Like her aunts Williamina and Johanna Stevens Mackie, Ida May Stevens Garrett Bodman( Lot 6188) worked at the Observatory as a computer. Fleming’ s coworkers and fellow Women Astronomical Computers also dot the landscape: Amy J. McKay( Lot 5625), Anna and Louisa Winlock( Lot 4478), Harriet Ida and Mabel Cushman Stevens( Lot 3152), Imogen Willis Eddy( Lot 972), and Edith and Mabel Gill( Lot 5473).
Across Mount Auburn’ s verdant slopes, their monuments form a constellation of stone— beacons marking the women who once charted the heavens. They are among the forty-six women whom Fleming hired,
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