Includes index.

Bibliography: pages 299-305.

Part one: The colors of starlight. Mrs. Draper's intent ; What Miss Maury saw ; Miss Bruce's largesse ; Stella nova ; Bailey's pictures from Peru -- Part two: Oh, be a fine girl, kiss me!. Mrs. Fleming's title ; Pickering's "harem" ; Lingua franca ; Miss Leavitt's relationship ; The Pickering fellows -- Part three: In the depths above. Shapley's "kilo-girl" hours ; Miss Payne's thesis ; The Observatory Pinafore ; Miss Cannon's prize ; The lifetimes of stars -- Some highlights in the history of the Harvard College Observatory -- A catalogue of Harvard astronomers, assistants, and associates.

"Before they even had the right to vote, a group of remarkable women were employed by Harvard College Observatory as 'Human Computers' to interpret the observations made via telescope by their male counterparts each night. A Scottish woman came to the observatory as a maid, pregnant and alone, but went on to identify ten novae and more than three hundred variable stars. A partially deaf young woman found astronomy a solace after the death of her beloved mother and designed a stellar classification system that was adopted the world over. After a lecture about an eclipse, a Cambridge student wrote down its every word from memory and didn't sleep for three nights; her passion was lifelong and she eventually became Harvard's first female professor of astronomy. The Glass Universe shines light on the hidden history of these extraordinary women who entered the burgeoning field of astronomy, changed our understanding of the stars and helped define our place in the universe." -- Jacket.