The recipient of six honorary degrees at Canadian and United States universities, she was made a Companion of the Order of Canada—one of the highest honors in the nation—and has two observatories named for her. Helen Hogg wanted everyone to find the same joy in the stars that she did and continued her work until late in her life. Her brilliance, enthusiasm, and warmth were widely recognized. And from the time the Observatory was founded when the son of Jessie Donalda and David Dunlap, Moffat Dunlap whose sons are here today laid the cornerstone, the spirit of this Observatory has been one of terrific devotion to the cause of astronomy.
I have seen the staff and the students carry that out for six decades and it has been a wonderful experience. It has given me pleasure, personally, to see my own field of variable stars and globular clusters carried on by my former student Dr. Christine Clement. And my associate Dr. Amelia Welhau of the University of Western Ontario was the one who was working on my plates of the globular cluster Messier 14 and spotted the image of that very important nova.
Now, we hear a great deal in the media these days about World War II. The war years at the David Dunlap Observatory were very hard.
Not many people here can remember those years at the Observatory — Dr. John Heard and Dr. Left behind were Dr. Young, Dr. George Campus of the University of Toronto by day. Hard years. In the s the staff, and the graduate students expanded greatly in number and in later decades sophisticated secondary instruments were developed to help counteract the increased brightening of the sky around Richmond Hill.
It happens that, just now, one of Dr. It makes me very humble, President Prichard, to think that I have been chosen to represent, in a manner of speaking, this wonderful spirit of the David Dunlap Observatory at its Southern Hemisphere Observatory, I think of David Dunlap and Jessie Donalda Dunlap and Clarence Augustus Chant and dedicated members of staff and students in these six decades since the cornerstone was laid and I am very humble.
President Prichard, we do not think that you have time to take the excellent courses that the Department is running, but perhaps this popular book of astronomy… Dr.
National Museum of Science and Technology, Canada. Her father, a banker, and her mother and aunt, former schoolteachers, encouraged her to observe and learn about wildflowers and ferns and leaves and rocks and stars.
Which she did, receiving a Ph. A favoured few see it twice. Though Hogg, who taught at U of T for 31 years and has been doing research at the David Dunlap Observatory since , turned 80 last month, she shows no signs of wanting to retire to a rocking chair on the front porch to watch the world go by. Her job is to watch the universe go by. An internationally recognized authority on variable stars in globular star clusters, she observes changes in the size, temperature and brightness of hundreds of stars in globular star clusters in order to be able to estimate, among other things, their age and their distance from the sun.
That adds to the information we have on our galaxy, the Milky Way, which contains about a hundred thousand million stars, one of which is our sun, and is just one of millions of galaxies in the universe. About globular clusters outline the Milky Way. Galaxies more massive than our own have more clusters — perhaps as many as 10, Each cluster contains tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of stars moving in slow and beautiful symmetry around a common centre of gravity as the cluster itself orbits around the centre of the galaxy.
The orbits take millions of years to complete. Clusters were the first stellar formations: with ages of 16 to 18 billion years, they are close to the age of the universe. So information about the way in which their stars — globes of glowing gas — pulsate as their nuclear-generated energy pours out is extremely useful. It takes years to accumulate, though. Clusters are only observable during our summer months, and if someone else needs the telescope, or clouds come up, or the sun gets between the earth and the cluster, the observer may have to wait a year for another chance to document the cycle further.
As the authority on the subject, she has combined them in a series of catalogues — the only such compilations that have ever been published — with the discoveries of other astronomers working in the same field of research. Her first catalogue was published in , and she is now working on her fourth up-to-date version. That is the way scholarship works in astronomy. When you deal in billions of years and in distances of tens of thousands of light years, 59 years of observing does not seem a great deal.
She is still doing bibliographical work and working with the glass negatives produced by other observer- photographers, but several years ago she gave up personal observing. Staying up all night and moving the huge telescope around was just too strenuous.
In she gave that up to accompany her Ontario-born husband, Frank, also an astronomer, to Victoria, where he had a job as a researcher with the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory. Rumour had it that Cecilia Payne, now regarded as the foremost woman astronomer of all time, had been turned down for the job because it would not be proper for a woman to spend nights in the dome with male technicians.
As long as her husband was willing to chaperone her, she was allowed to do her observing. So by virtue of being a married woman, she was able to use the telescope to which brilliant Cecilia Payne had been denied access. Far from being held back in her career by her marriage, she was actually advancing beyond the boundaries established for unmarried female astronomers. The first year, Helen spent many a winter night keeping Frank company as he worked on his programs of observation.
That summer she had a baby and took her up in the dome in her basket on several occasions so that she could be fed on time. Helen was not held back by motherhood. In Frank took a position as a lecturer and researcher at the new David Dunlap Observatory of the University of Toronto, whose telescope bumped the one in Victoria to third place.
The second year the Hoggs were in Toronto, J. I was brought up that home is where the child is unless it is in school. From on she was working virtually full-time. In her responsibilities increased as male astronomers went to war, and she became a lecturer as well as a researcher.
Frank Hogg died on Jan. Meanwhile, she was rising through the ranks at the University, becoming a full professor in In she received the Annie J. Cannon prize of the American Astronomical Society, an international award given once in three years to a woman astronomer for her research. In she received an honorary doctorate from Mount Holyoke.
In she was elected president of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. In the University of Waterloo awarded her an honorary degree. In she became the first female president of the Royal Canadian Institute. The following year she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada. In she became the first president of the Canadian Astronomical Society. In an International Astronomical Union colloquium was held at the University of Toronto in honour of her life work.
In she was promoted to Companion of the Order of Canada. That year she retired from teaching and was named Professor Emeritus. The following year she was awarded an honorary degree by U of T. In , the year she stopped writing her newspaper column, she collected an honorary degree from St. Her career seemed to be drawing quietly to a close. Then in the spring of , with the receipt of the Dorothea Klumpke-Roberts award, given by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for her fostering of public understanding and appreciation of astronomy, the honours started coming in again.
The following year the International Astronomical Union named a minor planet Sawyer Hogg after her in recognition of her scholarly and popular contributions to astronomy. Helen Sawyer Hogg died in Toronto at the age of She had received numerous distinctions for her work in astronomy and for her efforts to popularize the science, including the Order of Canada. Asteroid was named in her honour. The lecture, given each year by an invited speaker during the annual meeting of the two societies, commemorates her contributions to public appreciation of the universe.
Home Astronomers Helen Sawyer Hogg Helen Sawyer Hogg A world expert in galaxy clusters and variable stars, she inspired many women to enter science and helped popularize astronomy in Canada Helen Sawyer was born in at Lowell, Massachusetts. Accessed 14 November In The Canadian Encyclopedia.
Historica Canada. Article published December 20, ; Last Edited December 20, The Canadian Encyclopedia , s. Thank you for your submission Our team will be reviewing your submission and get back to you with any further questions.
Thanks for contributing to The Canadian Encyclopedia. Article by Michael Wilcox. Members of the U of T astronomy department in with the David Dunlap Observatory in the background: from left to right, S. MacRae, Ruth Northcott, J. Fernie and J.
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