Finding Your Families

Annie Jean Eastley 1933 - 2011   Continuing with Black History Month this blog post celebrates the life and work of Annie Easley (1933-2011) . Annie Jean Easley helped make modern spaceflight possible. Her work at NASA (and its predecessor NACA) as a computer scientist, mathematician, and rocket scientist laid the technological foundations that future space launches, including the Cassini satellite destined to explore Saturn, relied upon. She was born on 23 Apr 1933 in Birmingham Alabama. This was before the US Civil Rights Act, which meant that, as a black person, her education and career opportunities were very limited, and she had to make the best of every chance she got. She was raised by a single mother who encouraged her that she could do anything she wanted as long as she worked at it. After graduating top of her year at high school, she studied pharmacy in New Orleans (she did not graduate), returning to Birmingham when she was 21 to work as a supply teacher. In between teachi

    October is Black History Month. Being a history of science nerd I shall celebrate this by sharing a few selected snippets about African science and mathematics. This week, some notes about aspects of African astronomy you probably didn’t know. The Dogons of Mali The Dogon people of Mali live on the western edge of the Sahara desert, and their oral traditions state that for thousands of years they have known that the Earth revolves round the sun, Jupiter has moons, Saturn has a ring, and that Sirius has a companion star (a fact not known in the West until 1862). It is thought they brought this knowledge with them as they migrated west from Egypt, keeping it hidden from outsiders until the 1950s. So sure were they about Sirius that they based their calendar on the 50 year orbit of Sirius B and Sirius A. The Stone Circle at Nabta Playa Contrary to popular belief Europeans weren’t the first to make predictions from astronomical observations. Further east of Mali at Nabta Playa