Dorothea Klumpke Roberts Biography

      Dorothea Klumpke Roberts came form an established family of nine, including her parents. She was born on August 9th, 1861 in San Francisco, California. Her father had moved there in the 1850s along with many others during the Gold Rush. However, he was not successful in that particular field. Although he did not strike it rich, he became a very successful realtor. He eventually met Dorothea Mathilda Tolle and they were married. In 1877, seven children later, Dorothea's family moved to Paris, France and several of her sisters went to schools in Germany and Switzerland. Out of her four sisters and two brothers, a wealth of them became accomplished people of their own. One an artist, another a violinist, one a pianist, and one a neurosurgeon. Dorothea herself went to school to study music but became fascinated with astronomy. She earned her bachelor's degree in the field in 1886 and took up a position at the Paris observatory. There she worked with Guillaume Bigourdan and Lipót Schulhof, and later with the pioneer astrophotographers Paul and Prosper Henry, who were working with a 34 cm refractor and photographing the minor planets, also known as assteroids. Her work consisted of measuring star positions, processing astrophotographs, studying stellar spectra and meteorites. In 1886 Sir David Gill proposed an atlas of the heavens. The idea received enthusiastic support, especially from the Director of the Paris Observatory, Admiral Amédée Mouchez, who suggested an international meeting in Paris. This led to the Carte du Ciel project which required photographing the entire sky and showing stars as faint as the 14th magnitude. The Paris Observatory was required to map a large portion of the sky. Ten years later, Dorothea traveled to Norway to see a solar eclipse. Although the eclipse was a bust, she met her future husband, Dr. Isaac Roberts. He had his own observatory equipped his private observatory with a 50 cm reflector and camera, and a 13 cm Cooke refractor. Five years later, in 1901, the two were married, and Dorothea worked with Roberts on a project to photograph all 52 of the Herschel "areas of nebulosity." Although Roberts died four years later, Dorothea returned to Paris Observatory and spent 25 years processing the plates and Isaac's notes, periodically publishing papers on the results.rothea kept up the research. She published a survey entitled, "The Isaac Roberts Atlas of 52 Regions, a Guide to William Herschel's Fields of Nebulosity" and was awarded the Hèléne-Paul Helbronner prize in 1932 from the French Academy of Sciences for this publication.