Henrietta Swan Leavitt, born in Lancaster, Massachusetts July 4, 1868, was born to a congressional church minister and house wife. Her early education is less known about but it is known that she went Oberlin College for some time but then moved to Radcliffe College and graduated from that institution. While at Radcliffe, Leavitt attended an astronomy class in her senior year, sparking her interests. After graduation in 1892 she went to work at the Harvard college observatory under Edward Charles Pickering, another famous astronomer, and became part of the team of women who calculated the brightness of variable stars, thousands by the end of the observing time. While documenting these stars she noted that the brighter stars had a longer period. After 4 years of further study she found that those with a higher luminosity almost always had a larger period. This discovery leads to the period-luminosity relationship, specifically Cepheid Variables. With this new relationship in hand, astronomers were eventually able to calculate distance beyond parallax, meaning, a new yard stick had been made to measure the universe with!!!!! The work done by Leavitt would allow Hubble, the man and not the telescoped named after him, to do his most famous works and eventually, kids in high school would use her method of determining distance. Sadly, she was never a very healthy person and in 1921 she succumbed to cancer. Oddly enough, she was almost nominated for a Noble Prize in 1926 in physics because the nominator was unaware of her death. Now, the asteroid 5383 Leavitt and the lunar crater Leavitt are named in her honor.
