Henrietta Hill Swope

She was the daughter of Mary Hill and Gerard Swope, and niece of Herbert Bayard Swope. Both of her parents taught at Hull-House in Chicago in the late 1890s, where they met. Her father had attended MIT and was an engineer. He worked for General Electric, eventually rising to be president of the company in 1922 and enabling his daughter to be independently wealthy throughout her life. She also heard Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley speak; eventually she would go to work with him on variable stars. ==Education==

Swope attended Barnard College, and graduated in 1925, with an AB degree in mathematics. She only took an astronomy class, from Harold Jacoby, in her final year. After college, she went back to Chicago and attended the School of Social Service Administration, at the University of Chicago, but only for one year. ==Professional history==

She learned that Dr. Shapley at Harvard was offering fellowships for women to work on finding variable stars. Swope went to work for Shapley in 1926 and began working alongside other "girls" to identify variable stars in the Milky Way. In her Oral History, she says, "...they said, 'How much were you getting [at Harvard]?' And I said, I think, $2000. That’s what they say they would pay me, what I was getting, but that was too little for them. They couldn't. So I rose fairly quickly." From 1942-1947, she worked on the LORAN navigation tables. ==Legacy==

In 1967, Swope made a donation of securities valued at $650,000 to the Carnegie Institution of Washington to develop "optical astronomical observatory facilities in the Southern Hemisphere." This gift was used for development of the site, including roads, water, and power systems, and for building a 40-inch telescope at Carnegie's Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. This telescope was named the Swope Telescope in her honor; it started operation in 1971 and is still used today. Swope also left most of her estate to Carnegie to support further Las Campanas and astronomical research at the institution more generally. Henrietta Hill Swope died at the age of 78 in Pasadena in California. ==Awards and honors==

• Annie J. Cannon Award in 1968 • Asteroid 2168 Swope is named in her honor. • Barnard Distinguished Alumnae Award, 1975 • The Swope Telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile is named in her honor. • Honorary PhD, 1975, University of Basel, Switzerland • Barnard College Medal of Distinction, 1980 ==References==