Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Cross-post: The Star-Studded Life of Ms. Dorothy Bennett

Photo credit: Piotr Redlinski

In April 2016, author Amy Sohn wrote a piece in JSTOR Daily on Dorothy Bennett, a woman who was influential in the founding of the Hayden Planetarium as an assistant curator, delivering over 1000 lectures there.

Ms. Bennett had a remarkable career, which included  co-authoring an introduction to astronomy for young readers in 1935 called Handbook of the Heavens along with a then-member of the club and an astronomer at the museum.  It stayed in print for nearly sixty years.  

Ms. Bennett also organized an expedition to Cerro de Pasco, Peru, in June 1937, to view the longest solar eclipse until 2004.  To read the entire article, go to:

https://daily.jstor.org/dorothy-bennett/

“Expedition team with Te-Ata Fisher arriving at Callao, Peru, 1937,” Charles H., Coles, Courtesy American Museum of Natural History.