Sunset to Stars

Friday night we packed up two G & Ts, grabbed the bag of pistachios and headed for the sunset. Others had the same idea, but with a bit more style.

 

Our lack of style didn’t dim our popularity, even if it was probably more about the pistachios than us.

          Saturday we took in a matinee – at the Asolo Theatre, which sits on the grounds of the Ringling Museum, where you’ll find the family mansion, a museum of art, and (surprise!) a circus museum.

          In 1798, architect Antonio Locatelli built the Asolo for Caterina Cornaro, the Queen of Cyprus. In 1855 another architect redesigned it, and then in 1931 it was dismantled to make way for a film theater. It then changed hands and was stored in Venice for the length of World War II. In 1949 the Ringling bought it for $8,000 and moved into its new home in Sarasota.

          The theater was stunning, but the real supernova of the night was the story of Henrietta Leavitt and her fellow “computers” Annie Cannon and Willamina Fleming at Harvard’s Observatory. They charted photographic plates of the sky to measure and catalogue the brightness of stars, making 25 cents an hour. The work began in the 1880s, the women – some with the same credentials as the men for whom they worked – unable to access the telescope themselves.

 Leavitt ultimately discovered the relation of a star’s brightness to its size, and for the first time it was possible to measure a star’s distance to Earth, setting the path to discovering the size of the Universe. The director of the Observatory, Edward Pickering claimed the discovery as his own, and others built on her findings without giving Leavitt credit. If a production of “Silent Sky” by Lauren Gunderson should come your way, go!