A submission to the PASP today considers the “Legacy of Henrietta Leavitt: A Re-analysis of the First Cepheid Period-Luminosity Relation”:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17438
The authors re-analyse Leavitt’s first Period-Luminosity relation using observations of the same set of stars but with modern data and methods of Cepheid analysis. They go on to consider the discovery of two types of Cepheid populations and the implications for Hubble’s measurements of the distance to our neighbouring galaxies.
I will touch on this topic at the Deep Sky Section meeting, as two key Type II Cepheids were actually discovered in 1890 by David Packer, who for many years was a BAA member living in Birmingham.
