Trailblazers & Stargazers: Women in Polish Astronomy
Apparently the astrolabe, a device used to determine the location of celestial bodies, was invented by a woman – the Alexandrian mathematician, philosopher and astronomer Hypatia. Women have played a significant role in the history of studying outer space for ages! Let’s take a closer look at its Polish chapter.
The face of Polish astronomy is, of course, Mikołaj Kopernik (Nicolaus Copernicus), and his brilliant life greatly overshadows other – especially female – names. However, women have always been involved in researching space, not just as ‘wives of their astronomer husbands’ but also on their own accord, as active scientists.
Maria Kunic: more brilliant than Kepler
Maria Kunic (also: Cunitz, Cunitia) is now called ‘the Silesian Hypatia’ and considered the first woman-astronomer active on the lands of today’s Poland. She was born in 1610 in Silesia, a region with which she remained associated for her entire life. Her father Henryk Kunic, a doctor from Legnica, came from a family of scientists and researchers, and also conducted his own astronomical observations (for instance, with the Danish astronomer Tucho Brahe, the tutor of Johannes Kepler).
The scientific background of their family home caused Maria to focus strongly on obtaining a good education. She managed to master seven languages, she took up music and painting, and, at the same time, she indulged her passion for the sciences. She later shared her astronomical interests with her husband, Eliasz Kreczmar, the author of an astrological study released in Wrocław entitled Horologium Zodiacale. Sources claim that Kunic’s lifestyle was negatively perceived and commented on by the inhabitants of Świdnica often – the astronomer was forced to make up for the sleep she lost due to her nightly observations by sleeping during the day, which was considered to be her neglecting her ‘womanly duties’...
The couple kept up correspondence with Jan Heweliusz, who was the same age as Maria. The astronomical acquaintance was made when Kunic was working on her most important work – the publication Urania Propitia (Latin for ‘Accessible Astronomy’) released in Oleśnica in 1650, dedicated to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III. It constituted a perfected – corrected and simplified – version of Kepler’s famous Rudolphine Tables. The tables, based on the heliocentric model, enabled a more precise measuring of the location of planets. The Silesian astronomer wrote Urania… in both Latin and German, which made it easier to promote. The work is considered one of the earliest print publications written by a woman in the history of science.
In 2020, the second edition of Urania…, released in Frankfurt, was bought at an auction by the city of Świdnica for 8,500 Euros, and the book was added to the collection of its Museum of Old Trade. Currently, a monument designed by Stanisław Strzyżyński – a bench with the figure of Maria Kunic holding Urania Propitia and an astrolabe in her hands – stands in front of the museum building on Świdnica’s main square. There’s also a Venus crater named after her, as well as a planetoid discovered in 1960 (named Mariacunitia).
Elżbieta Heweliusz: sleepless nights
Jan Heweliusz, the mayor of Danzig (Kingdom of Poland) and a renowned astronomer, is a symbol of the city of Gdańsk. There are at least three monuments of him around town and his name is well-known. Few people, however, remember his life and work partner (also born in Gdańsk), Elżbieta Heweliusz. The astronomer is mostly remembered and mentioned only as her much older husband’s helper, while, in fact, she became passionate about astronomy and studied it long before she married Jan.
Elżbieta Koopman was born in 1647 to a well-off merchant couple. The character of Gdańsk, at the time – a wealthy city, open to co-operation with other cities, which cared about its inhabitants’ education – was definitely favourable for Elżbieta’s development. She quickly became a very well-educated person. In the first-ever study on the history of Polish astronomy, Feliks Kucharzewski mentions Koopman, but only as a sidekick:
In 1663, after the death of his first wife, he once again entered a marriage, this time with Elżbieta Korpman [sic!], a daugter of a Gdańsk merchant, who then helped him greatly in his observations. This respectable woman spent not one but many sleepless nights in his observatory with him and, having attained the necessary proficiency in making observations, she easily told the angle and the relative distance of the stars, and therefore she fulfilled the role of her husband’s adjunct.
The couple spent their sleepless nights on Korzenna Street, in a townhouse where Jan Heweliusz constructed the best observatory (known as the ‘Star Castle’) in Europe on their terrace. One of the popular prints by Baroque painter and drafter Andreas Stech depicts the couple using a brass sextant together. After the death of her husband in 1690, Elżbieta Koopman completed and published (thanks to the financial support of Jan III Sobieski) their collaborative work, the star catalogue Prodromus Astronomiae, containing notes from over 1,500 star observations.
Both Kunic and Koopman are mentioned by the 18th century French astronomer Jérôme Lalande in his book Ladies’ Astronomy, released in Poland in 1821:
Text
We have, already, many instances of females, who have evinced a laudable spirit of inquiry, and great perseverance in the pursuit of this science. […] Maria Cunitz, the daughter of a physician of Silesia, published some astronomical tables in 1650; […] and the wife of Hevelius made observations with him.
Author
Trans. from French by W. Pengree
Elżbieta and Jan Heweliusz are buried in the Heweliusz family grave at St Katherine’s Church in Gdańsk. Just like the ‘Silesian Hypatia’, the (woman) astronomer is commemorated through a Venus crater and a planetoid.
Wilhelmina Iwanowska: followed by the stars
Iwanowska was born in 1905 in Wilno (Vilnius), into a family of impoverished gentry. Her initial educational path didn’t indicate that she would become a world-famous astronomer and the creator of a new scale of distance in the universe. The private Wilno middle school which she attended put a strong emphasis mainly on the humanities: Latin, religion, philosophy and art history. ‘Despite that, I decided to study mathematics’, she wrote in her academic memoir, highlighting that she had always felt passionate about astronomy and the sciences: ‘The decision came suddenly and irrevocably, like some sort of an inner compulsion’.
The lack of proper preparation, however, resulted in Iwanowska having to repeat the first year of mathematics, which she began studying at the Maths and Sciences faculty of the Stefan Batory University (the alma mater of such famous individuals as Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki, and the place where the Philomath Society was established). Mickiewicz immortalised this particular faculty and the then-oldest Polish observatory at Vilnius University in the 8th book of Pan Tadeusz, making use of the character of the Chamberlain who mentions:
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In Vilnius, I studied astronomy / where Mrs Puzynin, wealthy and wise / with profits from her village economy / more than two-hundred peasants in size / purchased various glasses and telescopes.
Author
Trans. Leonard Kress
Iwanowska eventually managed to catch up – filling in the gaps in her knowledge without missing an astronomy class – and, in 1929, she was awarded a Master’s degree in mathematics. The day when she received the offer to work as an assistant for the astronomer and mathematician Wacław Dziewulski she described as ‘the happiest in her life’. Her first academic paper in astronomy, ‘Demarcating the Sun’s Movements Using the Bravais Method’, written in English, was sent to several hundred astronomical observatories around the world. In 1933, taking the exam with high fever, she obtained the title of PhD. After that, she began her observation of cepheids (variable pulsating stars, around 10,000 times brighter than the Sun), which she continued throughout World War II.
After the war she co-established the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, whose vice-rector was none other than Dziewulski. Iwanowska, in turn, was awarded the title of associate professor of the Department of Radio Astronomy. ‘We needed to start over, to build everything from scratch’, she said when reminiscing on the period of building what is now one of the most important Polish universities.
In 1948, as a part of a six-month scholarship in the USA, she had the opportunity to meet with prominent researchers and to visit various astronomy centres, such as the McDonald Observatory placed on the desert plateau of Mount Locke in Texas. At Harvard, she had the chance to take a look at one of the first computers – it took up several rooms ‘cluttered with holders filled from top to bottom with valves and masses of wires’. She returned to Europe on the transatlantic ship ‘Batory’, bringing films and tapes on which she recorded spectra of around 200 stars from the Texas observatory with her. It’s the materials collected in the USA that, in the 1950s, became Iwanowska’s basis for creating a new scale of distance in the universe, which is considered the astronomer’s most brilliant achievement.
‘I treated telescopes as friendly living beings’, wrote Iwanowska in her memoir. The words of the woman, sometimes called ‘the first lady of Polish astronomy’, express an incredibly emotional attitude to the field. In the extensive interview conducted by Anna Plaskacz, the astronomer mentions her first conscious encounter with the stars:
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I remember this moment exactly. I was 2 and a half, maybe 3 years old. […] With a starry sky beyond me, I still remember having been overtaken by cosmic terror. I started running across the yard and what did I see? The stars following me. Please try it. You can’t escape the stars. You can’t go around them. […] Now I know it was a parallax, the illusion that stars were running after me, that they’d catch up with me and swallow me whole.
In the 1970s she prepared a series of readings for the 500th anniversary of Mikołaj Kopernik's birth – she delivered them in Canada, the USA, France, Czechoslovakia and Italy. Between 1973 and 1978, she was the vice-president of the International Astronomical Union. In an autobiographical text she claimed that she consciously ‘evaded the possibility of starting a family’, treating it as the biggest threat to the ‘gift that was academic work’.
She passed away in Toruń in 1999. An asteroid was named after her.
Rozalia Szafraniec: a frostbitten eye
Rozalia Szafraniec, born just five years after Iwanowska, in 1910, was an astronomer from the Kielce region. She came from a farming family and was one of seven children raised, for many years, by just her mother. Despite the tough circumstances and the lack of academic traditions in her family, Szafraniec managed to finish a secondary school in Kielce, thereby becoming the first secondary school graduate in the history of the Siekierno village. After that, she began studying mathematics at the University of Warsaw.
Her post-graduate supervisor was the famous Wacław Sierpiński, a prominent mathematician and a co-creator of the Polish school of mathematics. After her studies she was involved mainly in didactics, which she had planned on pursuing in the future. Then, the course of her life shifted when she received an offer to become an astronomy assitant. Szafraniec completed a year-long internship with the prominent astronomer Tadeusz Banachiewicz in an observatory on Mount Lubomir in the Lesser Poland Voivodeship.
World War II didn’t squash her passion for education – throughout the entire period of the Nazi German occupation, she taught clandestine classes in her hometown. As a conspiratorial activist and a member of the Home Army, Szafraniec’s life took a fateful turn, hampering her academic career and blocking all possibilities of international development. The authorities of the Jagiellonian University refused to award her ‘habilitation’ (editor’s note: a step above a doctorate in Poland) and didn’t allow her to travel to Philadelphia as a visiting professor.
In 1947, Szafraniec began to work at the Astronomical Observatory in Kraków. She defended her doctoral dissertation after just three years, which allowed her to be promoted from a senior assistant to an adjunct in the observatory. She served as an adjunct until 1973, when she retired. In the 1950s she joined the International Astronomical Union, where she sat on the commission coordinating international cooperation in researching binary stars. This type of stars was Szafraniec’s area of expertise, and in the 1960s, the scientist broke the world record, having observed binary stars over 50,000 times. She also discovered two new celestial bodies of the type. In his posthumous recollections of the scientist, Jan Mietelski, an astronomer and promoter of the field, mentioned this anecdote:
She didn’t cease her observations even with a serious frostbite on the skin of her face caused by the ice-cold eyepiece of the telescope; she just made herself a menacing-looking balaclava with small holes for the eyes.
Just like Wilhelmina Iwanowska, she never started a family, devoting herself fully to teaching and science (which, by the way, was a prerequisite for working with Tadeusz Banachiewicz, who would give his assistants an ultimatum: either family or science… but that is for another article). For many years she sent out radio time signals, for which she received an Honorary Badge of the Committee of Radio and Television. She also worked an editor of the quarterly Postępy Astronomii (Developments in Astronomy) for many years. She died in 2001 in Kraków.
• • •
Polish women-astronomers are continuing to push boundaries and look further and deeper into our universe. Meet Ewelina Ryszawa, a Polish mechanical engineer at the European Space Agency, as she tells Culture.pl about a Polish satellite she co-designed and her involvement with NASA’s InSight mission which sent a robotic lander to Mars. Looking forward (and upward) to the incredible women who come next.
Originally written in Polish, translated by AP, 2021
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