Emily Hughes Boyce (1906-1992) was an astronomer who worked at the Harvard College Observatory from 1929-1945. She worked primarily on identifying variable stars.
Hughes Boyce worked as a research assistant to the HCO director Harlow Shapley.1 In September 1940, Hughes Boyce presented her discoveries on variable stars in the Milky Way Galaxy at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, where her work provided evidence to the field of the presence of a condensation of variable stars at a distance of 31,000 light years.2 In 1942 and 1943, she published three papers with catalogs of newly discovered variable stars. Data that Hughes Boyce assembled on the periodicity of the Nova X Serpentis in unpublished notebooks from 1942 was used for new astronomical research in a 1990 article “The Peculiar Slow Nova X Serpentis 1” by German astronomers H.W. Duerbeck and W.C. Seitter.3 Her 1936 paper “One Hundred New Variable Stars in MWF 16,” published in the Harvard Observatory Bulletin, has been cited in three modern research papers between 2010 and 2021.4
Hughes Boyce traveled to the Soviet Union in 1936 as part of the Harvard-MIT Eclipse Expedition to observe the solar eclipse of June 19, 1936. The expedition was co-directed by her husband, Dr. Joseph C. Boyce of the Physics Department at MIT, and it was aided by scientists from the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. Hughes Boyce was one of the three female working astronomers involved in the expedition, alongside Catherine Stillman from Vassar College and Hughes Boyce’s fellow Harvard astronomer Henrietta Hill Swope.5 The party left Cambridge on April 8, 1936 to travel to Moscow, and in May they left Moscow to travel by rail, car, and camel to their observing site in the village of Ak Bulak in Kazakhstan.6 On the day of the eclipse, Hughes Boyce operated the Weston illumination meter and used it to take observations before, during, and after the event.7
Hughes Boyce was born in Oxford, Ohio to Ella R. and Raymond M. Hughes. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Miami University in Ohio, and she earned her M.A. in astronomy from Radcliffe College. She married physicist Joseph Canon Boyce in the late 1920s. In 1945, the couple left Cambridge in order for Joseph to pursue research positions in New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C. While in Chicago, Emily Hughes Boyce volunteered on the Illinois State Board of the League of Women Voters, and in Washington D.C., she became an assistant librarian in the Department of Astronomy of Georgetown University. She had at least one child, a daughter.8
Written by Elizabeth Coquillette, 2022
Selected Publications:
Boyce, Emily Hughes. “Eighty-one New Variable Stars in VSF 524 and 566.” Harvard College Observatory Bulletin 917 (December 1943), p. 1-5. Bibcode: 1943BHarO.917….1B.
Boyce, Emily Hughes. “One Hundred New Variable Stars in MWF 16.” Harvard College Observatory Bulletin 903 (May 1936), 28-32.
Boyce, Emily Hughes. “Twenty New Variable Stars with High Latitudes in MWF 6.” Harvard College Observatory Bulletin 911 (August 1939), 49-50. Bibcode: 1939BHarO.911…49B
Boyce, Emily Hughes. “Variable Stars in MWF 361,” Annals of the Harvard College Observatory, vol 109 no. 2 (1942), 11-13. Bibcode: 1942AnHar.109…11B
Boyce, Emily Hughes. “Variables in a field of high galactic latitude.” Publications of the American Astronomical Society, vol 10 (1946), 45.
Boyce, Emily Hughes and Masaaki Huruhata. “One hundred and fifty-two new variable stars in MWF 11.” Annals of the Harvard College Observatory vol. 109, no. 4 (1942), 19-24. Bibcode: 1942AnHar.109…19B
Shapley, Harlow, Emily Hughes Boyce, and Constance D. Boyd. “Four hundred new variable stars in a transparent low-latitude region.” Annals of the Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College vol. 90, no. 2 (1940), 239-151. Bibcode: 1940AnHar..90..239S
Citations:
1-Mary H. B. Gelfman, “Obituary: Emily Hughes Boyce, 1906-1992,” Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society vol 25, no. 4, 1495. ↩
2-“Report From the Field of Science: New Stars Found,” The New York Times, September 22, 1940.↩
3-H.W. Duerbeck and W.C. Seitter. “The Peculiar Slow Nova X Serpentis.” International Astronomical Union Colloquium, vol 122: Physics of Classical Novae (1990), 165-166.↩
4-https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1936BHarO.903...28B/citations↩
5-Vassar Miscellany News, October 7, 1936.↩
6-Donald H. Menzel and Joseph C. Boyce, “Eclipse in Ak Bulak.” The Technology Review, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, vol. 39, 1 (November 1936).↩
7- Ibid.↩
8-Gelfman, “Obituary: Emily Hughes Boyce, 1906-1992.”