La Porte County Public Library System

An illustrated portrait of astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt traces the years she spent measuring stars from her position at the Harvard College Observatory and her important discoveries that enabled the scientific community to gain a fuller understanding of the universe's vast size.

"As a child, Maria Mitchell longed to see beyond her little island of Nantucket. With help from her father, she discovered that, if you knew how to read them, the stars could tell you where you were -- and where you needed to go. Maria spent hours on the roof of her house scanning the sky -- finding constellations, nebulae, meteors, double stars. When the King of Denmark offered a prize to the first person to find a new comet, she did just that. In...

"Every evening, from the time she was a child, Maria Mitchell stood on her rooftop with her telescope and swept the sky. And then one night she saw something unusual--a comet no one had ever seen before! Miss Mitchell's extraordinary discovery made her famous the world over and paved the way for her to become America's first professional female astronomer."--

"Vera Rubin was one of the astronomers who discovered and named dark matter, the thing that keeps the universe hanging together. Throughout her career she was never taken seriously as a scientist because she was one of the only female astronomers at that time, but she didn't let that stop her. She made groundbreaking and incredibly significant discoveries that scientists have only recently been able to really appreciate-and she changed the way that...

"In a beautifully written, science-packed debut memoir, Egyptian-American astrophysicist Sarafina El-Badry Nance shares her personal story of resilience and liberation by grounding herself in her lifelong love of the stars. As a child, Sarafina El-Badry Nance spent nearly every evening with her father gazing up at the flickering stars and pondering what secrets the night sky held. She dreamt of becoming an astronomer from the age of five, but it wasn't...

Looks at the life of American astronomer, professor, and ufologist, Dr. Josef Allen Hynek, who was hired by the United Sates Air Force for his research on UFOs.