Dorothea Klumpke

Roberts' father, John Gerard Klumpke (1825-1917), was a German immigrant who came to California in 1850 with the Gold Rush and later became a successful realtor in San Francisco. He married Dorothea Mathilda Tolle in 1855, and the couple had five daughters and two sons. Her sisters included Anna Elizabeth Klumpke, painter and companion to the French animal painter Rosa Bonheur; Julia Klumpke, a violinist and composer; Mathilda, an accomplished pianist and pupil of Marmontel; and the neurologist Augusta, who, with her physician husband, Joseph Jules Dejerine, established a clinic and wrote numerous papers. In 1877, Klumpke moved to Paris, France, while her four sisters attended schools in Germany and Switzerland. She studied at the University of Paris. She began by studying music, but later turned to astronomy. She earned her bachelor's degree in 1886 and her PhD in 1893, with her dissertation focusing on the rings of Saturn. In 1887, she began working at the Paris Observatory alongside Guillaume Bigourdan and Lipót Schulhof, and later astrophotographers Paul and Prosper Henry. Her work consisted of measuring star positions, processing astrophotographs, and studying stellar spectra and meteorites. == Work ==

In 1886, Sir David Gill proposed an atlas of the heavens. The idea received enthusiastic support, especially from the Director of the Paris Observatory, Admiral Amédée Mouchez, who suggested an international meeting in Paris. This led to the Carte du Ciel project, which required photographing the entire sky and showing stars as faint as the 14th magnitude. The Paris Observatory was to do a major portion of the sky as its contribution. It was also envisioned that a catalogue of all the stars to the 11th magnitude be drawn up. Klumpke was appointed the Director of the Bureau of Measurements (Bureau des Mesures) at the Paris Observatory, In 1896, she sailed to Norway on the Norwegian vessel Norse King, to observe the solar eclipse of August 9, 1896. There, she became acquainted with Dr. Isaac Roberts, a 67-year-old Welsh widower, entrepreneur, and astronomer, who had become a pioneer in astrophotography. He had also attended the Paris Carte du Ciel Congress. In 1899, astronomers had predicted a great meteor shower now known as the Leonids. The French chose Klumpke to be the one to ride in a balloon to observe the shower. The shower turned out to be a complete failure. Dorothea Klumpke Roberts died on October 5, 1942, having been in poor health for a number of years. == Honors ==

She was the first recipient of the "Prix de Dames" from the Société astronomique de France in 1897, and in 1893 was made an Officier d'Académe of the French Academy of Sciences - up to that time, these honors had not been awarded to a woman. On December 14, 1893, she read her doctoral thesis, ''L'étude des Anneaux de Saturne'' to a large audience of academics at the Sorbonne, and was awarded the degree of Docteur ès Sciences; the first woman to do so. ==See also==