For nearly a month, from February 11, marking the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, to March 8, the date on which International Women’s Rights Day is celebrated, eight portraits of women astronomers who have worked "for" or "with" the Paris Observatory over the last three centuries will be published on the wire.
Find out the portrait of the eighth woman in this collection :
Jeanne Clavier (1889-1940)
Renée Canavaggia is a specialist of Cepheid variable stars. She is also interested in the measurement of the continuous spectrum of the Sun and stars and the effects of atmospheric absorption.
Renée Canavaggia began her studies at the University of Montpellier where she obtained a degree in philosophy in 1924. Later, once in Paris, where she moved with her sister Marie, she oriented her studies towards mathematics. She completed her internship at the Observatoire de Paris in 1929 and quickly joined the team of the Carte du Ciel where she was entrusted with missions of photography, measurement and calculation. In 1933, she obtained a degree in mathematics and continued her career in the stellar field.
She worked on numerical methods and stellar classification. In 1948, she defended a doctoral thesis in physical sciences : "Variation of the Balmer discontinuity in d Cephei, h Aquilae and z Geminorum". Throughout her career, she wrote and translated from English numerous publications for the general public and for scientists. From 1936 to 1940, she was head of work at the Bureau of Stellar Statistics of the Institute of Astrophysics of Paris, then between 1943 and 1945, she joined the Service of the Sky Map at the Paris Observatory as a research fellow of the CNRS. It is in this same service that on October 1, 1945, she was appointed assistant astronomer, then astronomer in 1945 and finally full astronomer in 1966.
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The Women Astronomers project at the Paris Observatory
At the initiative of the working group on equality between women and men, and with the support of the presidency of the Observatoire de Paris-PSL, a committee of female and male researchers, students and doctoral students has been formed to highlight the work of women astronomers who, as much as their male colleagues, have contributed to the scientific history of the institution. These women often remained in the shadow of the private sphere, rarely co-signing the publication of their own results, or confined to the role of assistant or scientific secretary, before finally obtaining the recognized status of astronomer at the beginning of the 20th century.
In addition to a first event in the form of a few web and Twitter publications on the occasion of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2023, the project plans to build up a documentary fund, to write wikipedia content to describe the work of the many women astronomers who have worked with the institution, and eventually to create an installation in the form of a portrait gallery, to be exhibited in the buildings of the institution.
Participating in this project are Romane Cologni, Lucie Cros, Léa Griton, Mathilde Malin, Rhita-Maria Ouazzani and Gilles Theureau.