Light Echoes: Remapping contributions of women human computers to the Astrographic Catalogue

Light Echoes is an immersive media artwork that transcribes the signatures of women ‘star measurers’ who worked on the Astrographic Catalogue in the 19th and 20th century into a virtual sky map. A workforce of women were employed to work as human computers on the Astrographic Catalogue at Sydney, Melbourne and Perth observatories between 1890 and 1964. Their work in measuring the positions of stars was a major contribution to this international scientific endeavour and is under-acknowledged in published documentation.

This work involved photographing signatures found in hundreds of logbooks held in the MAAS collection, at Sydney Observatory, and in the NSW Archives; cross-checking data to match up the signatures to the corresponding photographic plates; and using this new data to build a virtual sky map that embeds the women’s re-animated hand-drawn signatures into the astronomical coordinates of the stars they mapped.

The Astrographic Catalogue logbooks offer insight into both social and scientific systems that shifted in astronomy with the rise of photography in the late 19th century. Light Echoes evokes the confluence of human labour and machine automation as technological change materialised through the hands and minds of women who worked, invisibly, during this time.