Naomi Kitay Greenstein (c 1910-2002) worked at the HCO from c. 1936-c. 19381 and was listed as a co-author in HCO publications as late as 1954.2 Her work focused on calculating light curves for variable stars.3
Greenstein became interested in astronomy after meeting her future husband, Jesse Leonard Greenstein, who was studying astronomy at Harvard and would go on to have an illustrious career in the field. Though she was studying English, Greenstein decided to take a non-technical astronomy course at Mount Holyoke from now-famous female astronomer Helen Sawyer Hogg, who herself had earned her PhD at the HCO only a year or two prior. According to later accounts from Greenstein’s son, she told Sawyer Hogg that since she was going to marry an astronomer, she should learn something about the field.4 The couple married in 1934.5
While her husband was an astronomy PhD student at Harvard from 1934-1937, Naomi Kitay Greenstein did her own astronomy work at the HCO, making notes on the glass plates5 and publishing sole-author papers on the light curves of variable stars in 1937 and 1938.6 She was a co-author alongside Harlow Shapley in a Harvard paper published in 1954, suggesting that she may have continued to work with the HCO during the intervening years.
Between 1937-1948, Greenstein and her husband lived in Chicago and Texas, and in 1948 they moved to California for him to lead the astronomy program at CalTech.8 She pursued interests in art and theater, and together the couple built a collection of Chinese and Japanese art.9 They frequently welcomed students and postdocs into their home and were known as kind and welcoming hosts; at one point, they tried their hand at breeding Burmese cats and hired CalTech astronomy students as cat caretakers.
Naomi Kitay Greenstein graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1933. She died in 2002 leaving behind two sons, George S. Greenstein and Peter Greenstein, the former is an astronomy professor at Amherst College.10
Written by Elizabeth Coquillette, 2022
Selected Publications:
Greenstein, N. “Four Irregular Variables, AG, T, GG, and ES Carinae.” Harvard College Observatory Bulletin, 908 (March 1938): 25-29.
Greenstein, N. “Light Curves for Three Variables with Peculiar Spectra.” Harvard College Observatory Bulletin, 906 (July 1937): 3-6.
Shapley, H., L.B. Allen, and N. Greenstein. “New Variable Stars in Centaurus.” Astronomical Journal, 59 (August 1954): 270-271.
Citations:
1-Lindsay Smith Zrull, “Women in Glass: Women at the Harvard Observatory during the Era of Astronomical Glass Plate Photography, 1875-1975,” Journal of the History of Astronomy, vol. 52, no. 2 (2021): 137.↩2- H. Shapley, L.B. Allen, and N. Greenstein, “New Variable Stars in Centaurus,” Astronomical Journal, 59 (August 1954): 270-271.↩
3- Judith Cohen, “Uncle Jesse and the seven ‘early-career’ ladies of the night.” American Journal of Physics, 87 (September 2019): 778.↩
4- Ibid.↩
5-Virginia Trimble, “Obituary: Jesse Leonard Greenstein (1909-2002),” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 115 (July 2003): 890.↩
6- Zrull, “Women in Glass,” 132.↩
7-N. Greenstein, “Light Curves for Three Variables with Peculiar Spectra,” Harvard College Observatory Bulletin, 906 (July 1937): 3-6; N. Greenstein, “Four Irregular Variables, AG, T, GG, and ES Carinae,” Harvard College Observatory Bulletin, 908 (March 1938): 25-29.↩
8-Trimble, “Obituary,” 892↩
9-James Edward Gunn, “Obituary: Jesse Greenstein, 1909-2002,” Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, vol. 35, no. 5 (December 2003): 1465; Cohen, “Uncle Jesse.”↩
10- Trimble, “Obituary,” 896.↩
11- Ibid.↩