The moon’s surface is pockmarked with craters, the relics of
violent impacts over cosmic time. A few of the largest are visible to the naked
eye, and a backyard telescope reveals hundreds more. But turn astronomical observatories
or even a space probe on our nearest celestial neighbor, and suddenly millions
appear.
اضافة اعلان
Bettina Forget, an artist and researcher at Concordia University
in Montreal, has been drawing lunar craters for years. Forget is an amateur
astronomer, and the practice combines her interests in art and science. “I come
from a family of artists,” she said. “I had to fight for a chemistry set.”
Moon craters are named, according to convention, for scientists,
engineers and explorers. Some that Forget draws have familiar names: Newton,
Copernicus, Einstein. But many do not. Drawing craters with unfamiliar names
prompted Forget to wonder: Who were these people? And how many were women?
“Once this question embeds itself in your mind, then you’ve got
to know,” she said.
Forget pored over records of the International Astronomical
Union, the organization charged with awarding official names to moon craters
and other features on worlds around the solar system. She started underlining
craters named for women.
“There was not much to underline,” Forget said.
Of the 1,578 moon craters that had been named at that time, only
32 honored women (a 33rd was named in February).
“I didn’t expect 50 percent. I’m not that optimistic,” she said.
“But 2 percent? I was really shocked.”
Having so few moon craters named for women makes a powerful
statement, she said. “It creates an atmosphere where you think women aren’t
contributing.”
In 2016, Forget embarked on a project called “Women With Impact,”
drawing each crater named for a woman. Forget draws in a large notebook using
graphite for detailing and black acrylic paint. She captures the likeness of
craters on the near side of the moon, like Cannon and Mitchell, namesakes of
19th- and 20th-century female astronomers, by observing them with her 20cm
telescope. For craters like Resnik and Chawla, both named for female astronauts
and located on the far side of the moon that’s not visible from Earth, she
bases her drawings on images taken by
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Forget has so far completed all 32 drawings. The pieces, all
individually framed, have been displayed at an art gallery at Bishop’s
University in Sherbrooke, Quebec, and the Rio Tinto Alcan Planetarium in
Montreal. “Women With Impact” is meant to highlight the underrepresentation of
women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, Forget said. “A
crater is an absence of matter, a void,” she said. “That’s a parallel with a
void of women in STEM.”
Working with craters in two dimensions led Forget to add a third.
“I liked this idea of holding a moon crater in my hand,” she said. In 2019, she
began 3D printing models of each crater featured in “Women With Impact.” Forget
is now creating an inverted version of each one, essentially a stamp that
preserves the crater’s shape. “I could do an outie,” she said.
Forget is experimenting with different ways of affixing those
stamps to the soles of shoes. She plans to ship the stamps to female scientists
around the world and ask them to record their experiences creating their own
craters in a project called “One Small Step.” As the director of the SETI
Institute’s Artists in Residence program, Forget intends to first reach out to
women whose work focuses on astrobiology and exoplanets.
It’s important to celebrate the contributions of living female
scientists, Forget said. “The ‘Women With Impact’ series honors historical
women, but ‘One Small Step’ can honor and foreground women who are active in
STEM fields now,” she said.
As more moon craters are named for women, Forget plans to create
additional drawings, 3D models and stamps. She already has work to do — one
crater, Easley, was named in February for computer scientist Annie Easley.
Catherine Neish, a planetary scientist at the University of
Western Ontario, proposed the name Easley to the International Astronomical
Union in January. (Her husband urged her to consider not only the name of a
woman but also the name of a woman of color.) Neish had successfully proposed
craters Pierazzo and Tharp in 2015 for Elisabetta Pierazzo and Marie Tharp, and
she was aware of the small fraction of moon craters honoring women. “I was
gung-ho to slowly chip away at that number,” she said.
Neish already has another name in mind for a moon crater. “Very
few people can name craters because they don’t have a valid scientific reason
for doing so,” she said. “I want to use my privilege to recognize some of these
women who have come before me.”
Read more
Odd & Bizarre
