Annie Walker: The astronomer with an asteroid, but no known photographs

[cbabe]

https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2025-10-09/annie-walker-the-astronomer-with-an-asteroid-but-no-known-photographs.html

Annie Walker: The astronomer with an asteroid, but no known photographs

The International Astronomical Union has named an asteroid after the Victorian stargazer, who studied the skies for 25 years from Cambridge University, but whose work has remained forgotten for more than a century

EUGENIA ANGULO
OCT 09, 2025 - 05:58 EDT

Annie Walker was 15 years old when, in 1879, she started working as a “computer” at the Cambridge University Observatory. This involved hours and hours of routine, tedious, and intense calculations that astronomers disliked, but which, at the time, were essential for accurately measuring the positions of stars and planets. Calculators were usually boys, but observatories sometimes hired girls, as was the case with Walker, although her male colleagues had exclusive use of the telescopes. She managed to escape this humble status to become a senior observer in the Victorian era, documenting the positions of 1,585 stars individually and several thousand more collaboratively. In April, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) named an asteroid in the Themis group in her honor: (5400) Anniewalker = 1989 CM.

Walker’s name has escaped the shadows of oblivion and returned to the outer Main Belt following research by Mark Hurn, librarian at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, and historian Roger Hutchins. The two have been charting Walker’s career for over a decade and have just published their findings in the journal The Antiquarian Astronomer. “We clearly establish that she was, if not Britain’s first professional female astronomer, then certainly the second, behind only Caroline Herschel,” Hurn says via video link. In 1895, Walker was paid a salary of 90 pounds, making her the highest-paid woman in British astronomy at the time, far above all other computers.

…

Walker moved in with the Grahams, who lived in the observatory, with the telescopes next to the living room. For 25 years, she spent entire nights, hours and hours in darkness, staring at the sky, training her eyes to detect very subtle differences in the brightness of stars or their position, pointing, measuring, comparing, and taking notes. It was very intense work, but she was still a computer, and when day dawned, she would return to her calculations.

It was also the case that all three — Adams, Graham, and Walker — were religious dissenters, something quite unusual in Cambridge at the time. “They were Protestants, with quite radical convictions, not part of the Church of England or the establishment, so in many ways they were quite separate from the university itself,” explains Hurn. In this environment, Walker, the daughter of a corn miller, became the observatory’s principal observer.

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[lastlib]

1. Nevertheless, she persisted......

An amazing woman who gave us much.

[JoseBalow]

2. 'If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.' - Newton

'Giants' come in all sizes...

Thank you, Annie Walker!