Helen Sawyer Hogg - Life

Life

A 1926 graduate of Mount Holyoke College, she went on to Harvard Observatory to work with Annie Jump Cannon and Harlow Shapley on star clusters. She received her doctorate in 1931 from Radcliffe College.

She married husband Frank Scott Hogg in 1930, and the two moved to Victoria, British Columbia. There Frank had a job at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory. Helen was not hired, though, and had to work as his volunteer assistant. In 1935, the couple moved again to Ontario where she took a job at the David Dunlap Observatory. Helen Hogg's research during this time period focused on stars whose spectra contain absorption lines of elements including carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. Frank Hogg was director of the observatory from 1946 until his death in 1951.

Over the next six decades, she published numerous papers and established herself as a leader in the field of astronomy. In 1985, she married F. E. L. Priestley (Francis Ethelbert Louis Priestley) (1905–1988), a professor emeritus of English at the University of Toronto, who died in 1988. She died of a heart attack in 1993.