Daily Telescope: One of the few astronomical objects named after a woman

Enlarge / The Jones 1 Nebula. (credit: Michal Mlynarczyk)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It’s December 12, and today’s photo comes to us from Michal Mlynarczyk in the Holy Cross Mountains, Poland. The subject of Michal’s image is the lovely Jones 1 nebula.

This faint nebula was found in 1941 by an American astronomer named Rebecca “Becky” Jones using photographic plates. Its name, Jones 1, is notable because relatively few astronomical objects are named after women, and this is one of the first. Jones made her career as an assistant to other more “notable” astronomers of the day, including Harlow Shapley and Wallace Eckert.