Mary Adela Blagg- Lunar scientist

Bill Cawley on a Cheadle woman who deserves wider recognition in International Women's Day.

The first week of March is the time of the year given over to celebrate the achievements of women on International Women’s Day. A local woman who, as far as I know, is the only woman to have a crater on the Moon named after her and deserves wider local recognition is described below.

Mary Adela Blagg was born in 1858 in Cheadle. She was the eldest of five daughters and four sons of a solicitor. Largely self-educated in mathematics, she was attracted to astronomy by attending the university extension lectures of J.A. Hardcastle the grandson of the Astronomer Herschel, who encouraged her to original work in selenography” study of moon”.

Blagg achieved international repute by her work on the Moon. In 1900 lunar maps were still based on measurements made at the beginning of the 19^th century, but by 1900 means of photographing the Moon had improved considerably. In 1905 Professor Saunder who has worked with Blagg proposed an international committee to remedy lunar nomenclature, and he called for an accurate map of the Moon surface. An untimely death led to Mary Blagg undertaking a crucial role in mapping the Moon . Blagg was already engaged in compiling a list of features. Saunder’s sudden death in 1912 forced her to work on the mapping project completed a year later -the Collated List of Lunar Formations.

In 1920, Blagg joined the Lunar Commission. She secured the best photographs from Paris, Mount Wilson, and other observatories. From these she had by 1922 drawn the maps for the 10 outer portions of the Moon. After 1928 she and Dr K. Muller of Vienna developed a definitive list naming nearly 6,000 features, published as Named Lunar Formations of which the second volume was the atlas, not surpassed in accuracy until the 1960s.

She undertook masses of tedious work for others in effect the number crunching. The originality of her contribution was that she first disentangled the errors of the selenographers who had relied on earlier inaccurate measurements, and then brought order to the chaos that had accumulated in naming features on the Moon.

Blagg was one of the first women to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in January 1916. She died at her home in High Bank in Cheadle in 1944, highly respected and following in the great tradition of the amateur scientist.

Neil Armstrong 1930-2012

 

 

Neil Armstrong died over the weekend. For people of a certain age the exploits of Armstrong and other pioneers of space travel will remain for always an indelible part of their youth. Earlier today I looked up my diary entries for 1969. I was 14 years of age and in the week of the moon landing had been on holiday in Wales. We got back to Stoke that weekend and sat to watch the events of the night of the 20^th and 21^st of July unfold. The TV coverage was memorable; the BBC at the time had a policy of employing people who knew what they were talking about. And then in the early hours of that memorable Monday morning the news that Armstong and Aldrin had landed the moon vehicle and Armstrong was about to make his epoch making walk. The grainy TV screen made out a ladder and a boot as the astronaut made his descent and of course as he touched the surface of the moon his famous comment. A copy of The Guardian was bought commemorating the moon landing, which we kept until it disintegrated.

It was a time of optimism about the future of man in space and each episode of space exploration- whether it be American or Soviet- was eagerly anticipated. I particularly recall the Apollo 8 voyage in 1968. It was Christmas time and a particularly snowy holiday period. I remember looking up at the night sky at a brilliant full Moon as the astronauts beamed back the celebrated picture of a vulnerable planet Earth, a startlingly blue, and of course later the dramatic escape from catastrophe of Apollo 13. As someone told me today all these explorations were achieved by basic computers, slide rules and log tables.

I knew someone who met Armstrong and told me what a self-effacing and modest man he was. He never once sought to make personal gain from his triumph. The astronaut was the first to recognise that his supreme achievement was the product of teamwork, of the thousands of people who had worked on the space programme since the 1950s. In a modern age and in a time of instant celebrity perhaps we should reflect on what truly makes for a hero. Armstrong would certainly fit into this category, even though he shunned the limelight, because, for a brief shining moment he showed the way to the stars.