Dorothea Klumpke Roberts Biography

Dorothea Klumpke Roberts Biography

             

            Dorothea Klumpke (August 9, 1861-1942) was an astronomer born in San Franciso to a German immigrant father. John Gerald Klumpke and Dorothea Mathilda Tolle were her parents and she started her life with wealth due to her father's success as a real estate broker. She has four sisters and two brothers (one brother died as an infant). She was the first women to observe a Leonid Meteor Storm from above the Earth. She and her siblings started out at a school in San Fransico but around 1877, her parents moved them to Europe to seek a better education for their children. Dorothea Klumpke started out in music but switched to astronomy, and enrolled at the University of Paris where she got her Bachelor of Science degree in 1886. Later on, she won a post as attaché in the Paris Observatory where she worked with G. Bigourdan and Schulhof. After working with them, she worked with Paul and Prosper Henry on a new 34 cm refracting telescope that was created to take pictures of asteroids. She would measure star positions, reduce data, study meteorites and work on stellar spectra. In 1886, the Carte du Ciel project to create an atlas of the stars was started and April 1877, Klumpke became a linguist (translating papers into French) for the International Congress of Astronomers. By 1889, Klumpke became the first recipient of the Prix de Dames award from the Sociétié des Astronomique de France and by 1893, she was made an Officier d'Académe of the Paris Academy of Sciences (both of these experiences were firsts for women). By 1891, she became Director of the Bureau of Measurements at the Paris Observatory.

            In 1896, Klumpke went to go see the solar eclipse taking place in Norway August 9, 1896. This is where she met her future husband Dr. Isaac Roberts (who shared her love of astronomy). 1899, she was selected to be lofted in a balloon to observe the Leonid meteor shower; however, the shower did not appear well (only 15 Leonid meteors were spotted). Despite the Leonid meteor shower not being spectacular, she was still the first woman to make astronomical observations from a balloon. She left her post in 1901 to marry Isaac Roberts and move to a Sussex home. She completed the photography of 52 regions of the sky before moving back to Paris to stay with her mother and her sister Anna. There, she returned to the Paris Observatory to measure, reduce, and print the results of Issac's work. March 6th, 1925, Dr. Dorothea Klumpke officially joined the Eastbay Astronomical Society (EAS) as a paid member at Chabot Observatory (became first life member January 1928). Her donations to the EAS probably helped prevent them from going bankrupt. In 1932 she received the Hèléne-Paul Helbronner prize from the French Academy of Sciences for her work in publishing the atlases.
             On February 22, 1934, she was elected to be a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur. Shortly after the presentation as Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur, she left France with Anna and moved to San Francisco once again. October 5, 1942, Klumpke passed away after many years of being ill.