Design
The Nuns Who Helped Map the Night Sky
At the Vatican Observatory, four little-known sisters contributed to an international astronomy project.
At a convention in Paris in 1887, the world’s best astronomers hatched an ambitious plan. Harnessing the emerging technology of glass-plate cameras, they would photograph and map every star in the night sky, plotting each star’s position in an enormous catalog. This massive undertaking would require the participation of 20 observatories across six continents, each of which was assigned to chart a corner of the cosmos.
There are probably plenty of cases to be made for various ”most badass” contributions to the Carte du Ciel, as the multi-decade (and still incomplete) project came to be known. This one has to do with nuns.