Adelaide Ames

Did You Know?

• Ames had no siblings and was described by friends as having devoted and adoring parents.
• Her father, T.L. Ames, served as a colonel in the U.S. Army.
• She spent periods of her childhood living in the Philippines and Washington D.C.

Biography

Adelaide Ames started college at Vassar in 1918, graduating in 1922, then moved on to Radcliffe College, which had just launched a graduate astronomy program. During her college years, she wanted to be a journalist and wrote for the Vassar Miscellany News while also taking astronomy courses. In January 1923, she became the first graduate student in astronomy at the Harvard College Observatory, and the following year she earned her M.A. from Radcliffe, making her the first woman to do so in that field. She joined the American Astronomical Society and was chosen for the International Committee on Nebulae and Clusters in 1928. That same year, she represented the U.S. at the International Astronomical Union congress in Leiden, Netherlands, and later served as secretary for the organizing committee of the 1932 IAU congress held at Harvard. Unable to find work as a journalist, she took a research assistant position at the Harvard College Observatory, where she stayed for the rest of her life. Her main project was cataloging galaxies in the Coma and Virgo constellations, and by 1931 she had compiled a catalog of nearly 2,800 objects. This work led to her membership in IAU Commission 28 on Nebulae and Star Clusters. On June 26, 1932, while on vacation at Squam Lake, she and a friend were canoeing when their boat capsized. She was presumed drowned, and her body was recovered after a ten-day search on July 5, 1932. She was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Research at Harvard

Adelaide Ames began her career at the Harvard College Observatory in 1921, hired as an assistant by the new director, Harlow Shapley. She was Shapley’s first graduate student and later mentored her own students. Her initial work involved pinpointing NGC and IC objects. By 1926, she and Shapley had published studies on the shapes, colors, and sizes of 103 NGC galaxies. In 1930, she released a catalog of 2778 nebulae covering the Coma-Virgo group, which included 214 NGC and 342 IC objects within the Virgo Cluster. Collaborating with Shapley on the Shapley-Ames catalog, they documented galaxies brighter than the 13th magnitude. Examining roughly 1250 galaxies, they discovered uneven clustering near the Milky Way’s north pole compared to the south pole. This finding of a general irregularity in galaxy distribution challenged the prevailing assumption of isotropy.