Long-term monitoring is of fundamental significance in solving many important problems in astrophysics and, furthermore, has unequalled value in extending observational runs with small telescopes for the education of young astronomers in order to teach them how to secure high-quality observational data over many years. The Impact of Long-Term Monitoring on Variable Star Research contains reports based on the analysis of data collected in the visible, IR and radio measurement ranges, as well as the design and history of well known photometric systems. Though the reporting of novel results forms an important part of the book, there are also reports of eight discussion sessions covering more general areas, such as extinction monitoring, the problems of archival storage of astronomical data, service observation, the role played by long-term monitoring in graduate teaching and thesis supervision, the interplay between the great observational effort and theory, the contribution of LTM to new knowledge of fundamental data, and the increasing decommissioning of telescopes of modest aperture.

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Dava Sobel, the "inspiring" (People), little-known true story of women's landmark contributions to astronomy A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017 Named one of the best books of the year by NPR, The Economist, Smithsonian, Nature, and NPR's Science Friday Nominated for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award "A joy to read.” —The Wall Street Journal In the mid-nineteenth century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or “human computers,” to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night. At the outset this group included the wives, sisters, and daughters of the resident astronomers, but soon the female corps included graduates of the new women's colleges—Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith. As photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the ladies turned from computation to studying the stars captured nightly on glass photographic plates. The “glass universe” of half a million plates that Harvard amassed over the ensuing decades—through the generous support of Mrs. Anna Palmer Draper, the widow of a pioneer in stellar photography—enabled the women to make extraordinary discoveries that attracted worldwide acclaim. They helped discern what stars were made of, divided the stars into meaningful categories for further research, and found a way to measure distances across space by starlight. Their ranks included Williamina Fleming, a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid who went on to identify ten novae and more than three hundred variable stars; Annie Jump Cannon, who designed a stellar classification system that was adopted by astronomers the world over and is still in use; and Dr. Cecilia Helena Payne, who in 1956 became the first ever woman professor of astronomy at Harvard—and Harvard’s first female department chair. Elegantly written and enriched by excerpts from letters, diaries, and memoirs, The Glass Universe is the hidden history of the women whose contributions to the burgeoning field of astronomy forever changed our understanding of the stars and our place in the universe.