IN 1877 Isabel Gill visited an inhospitable volcanic blob in the mid-Atlantic to help her husband with ground-breaking astronomical measurements. Then she wrote a wrote a book about it, including an attempt to explain to fellow Victorian ladies the concept of a solar parallax in terms she thought they might be able to grasp:"I myself do not understand mathematical terms, so how could I use them with the hope of explaining these things to my readers? However, I can use knitting-needles, and perhaps they may do just as well."
Wierdly, more than a century later another astronomer visited the site and found the sandy paths which marked the Gill's lava-top camp still undisturbed by the Atlantic winds.
posted by penguin pie on Sep 16, 2004 - 17 comments