Dr. Anne Sewell Young (1871-1961) was a prominent astronomer and professor who specialized in variable stars. While she was never directly employed by the Harvard College Observatory, she did volunteer work identifying variable stars for the HCO between 1906-1910.1 This work led to her co-founding the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) in 1911 and serving as its president from 1922-1924.
Young spent 37 years as a professor at Mount Holyoke College and the director of its John Payson Williston Observatory. Her teaching was credited with inspiring the careers of many female astronomers, and some of her undergraduate astronomy students went on to pursue graduate degrees in astronomy at the Harvard College Observatory, including Adelaide Ames and Helen Sawyer Hogg.2 One of the highlights of her teaching career was organizing a special train to transport students from Mount Holyoke and other women’s colleges to a golf course in Connecticut to view the total solar eclipse of January 24, 1925, a moment that Sawyer Hogg described as foundational in her decision to pursue astronomy.3
Young received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Carleton College in 1892 and 1897, respectively, and she received her PhD in astronomy from Columbia University in 1906 with a dissertation on clusters of stars in the constellation Perseus.4
Written by Elizabeth Coquillette, 2022
Citations:
1-Dava Sobel, The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took Measure of the Stars (New York: Viking, 2016), 153.↩2-Helen Sawyer Hogg, “Obituary: Anne Sewell Young,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol. 3 (December 1962), 355; Sobel, The Glass Universe, 179.↩
3-Sawyer Hogg, “Obituary,” 356.↩
4-Marilyn Ogilvie and Joy Harvey, The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: Pioneering Lives From Ancient Times to the Mid-20th Century (London: Routledge, 2000), 1413.↩