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Anna Von Merten’s wonderful book “Attention is Discovery: The Life and Legacy of Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt” has just been published.
Anna has asked me to pass on details about some talks she is giving in October.
At the RAS and online on Oct 15:
https://ras.ac.uk/events-and-meetings/Public-Lectures-and-EventsAnd she will be speaking at Greenwich Observatory on Friday, October 18th in conversation with visual artist Aura Satz and playwright Stella Feehily:
https://www.rmg.co.uk/whats-on/royal-observatory/re-envisioning-her-stars-pioneering-women-astronomers-contemporary-artI’ve been asked about availability of the book. It’s published by MIT Press: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049382/attention-is-discovery/
Available through Amazon.
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/2502.17438The 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.
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