Williamina Fleming

Williamina Paton Stevens Fleming (May 15, 1857 – May 21, 1911) was a Scottish astronomer. During her career, she helped develop a common designation system for stars and catalogued thousands of stars and other astronomical phenomena. Fleming is especially noted for her discovery of the Horsehead Nebula in 1888.

Biography

Williamina was born at 86 Nethergate, Dundee, on May 15, 1857, to parents Robert Stevens, a carver and gilder, and Mary Walker. She married James Orr Fleming, an accountant and widower of Isabella Barr, at Paradise Road, Dundee, on May 26, 1877. Williamina was a teacher before travelling to Boston with her husband. After she and her child were deserted by James, she worked as a maid in the home of Professor Edward Charles Pickering. Pickering became frustrated with his male assistants at the Harvard College Observatory and, according to legend, famously declared his maid could do a better job.

In 1881, Pickering hired Fleming to do clerical work at the observatory. While there, she devised and helped implement a system of assigning stars a letter according to how much hydrogen could be observed in their spectra. Stars classified as A had the most hydrogen, B the next most, and so on. Later, Annie Jump Cannon would improve upon this work to develop a simpler classification system based on temperature.