Good morning everyone,

Something that cheers me up immensely right now is the quality of light in the evenings. Just after the sun sets when all the trees are silhouetted against that intense indigo blue sky. It never fails to fill me with wonder that this quality of light happens all over again at this time of year, so let's ride that process of forgetting and remembering all the way to a Fem Fri about women and light.

We're starting with one of my favourite pieces of art by a woman, Shirazeh Houshiary's window for St Martin's in the Fields in London. Every time I walk past it the chances are maybe two in three that I will grasp the arm of my companion and say "look – look at that – isn't that great". It really is:

Reminiscent of a cross, the horizontal and vertical lines move towards a central opening that allows light to pass through. The grid-like concept blends elements of religion with complex architecture, forming a monochromatic piece that produces a unique light experience. The window is held within a stainless steel framework composed of a number of handmade glass panels, each of which is etched with fragments of Houshiary’s paintings to create a subtle feathery pattern on both sides of the glass.

https://mymodernmet.com/shirazeh-houshiary-east-window-st-martin-in-the-fields-london/

Moving on to more distant light, here's Tabetha Boyajian who discovered a mysterious star with patterns of light fluctuating around it. It's informally called Tabby's Star, she is quite young to have a star named after her and that must surely be one of the best things that can happen to you in a career in astronomy. Or a career in anything, I suppose. Astronomy increases your chances of having a star named after you but offers no guarantees. Anyway, here is a story of professional and citizen science working hand in hand to do cool work:

 “We’d never seen anything like this star,” says Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.” Kepler was looking for tiny dips in the light emitted by this star. Indeed, it was looking for these dips in more than 150,000 stars, simultaneously, because these dips are often shadows cast by transiting planets. Especially when they repeat, periodically, as you’d expect if they were caused by orbiting objects.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/the-most-interesting-star-in-our-galaxy/410023/

Bringing it back home while also staying in space, I enjoyed this essay on Goodnight Moon's debt to Gertrude Stein:

When my children were still little, I went from reading Goodnight Moon at night to teaching Gertrude Stein to my college students in the morning. In the midst of talking with them about Stein’s radical experiments, I was struck by how familiar they seemed. Instead of noticing Stein’s break with tradition, I noticed how much her work had in common with the books I was reading at bedtime: a love of color, joy in ordinary objects, repetition with unexpected variation. This dovetailed with another observation: My students are not as puzzled by Stein as I expect them to be. Stein writes: “Glazed Glitter. Nickel, what is nickel,” and my students recognize the moment of wondering. This habit of wonder is familiar in part because we have been raised on the lists of Goodnight Moon. That similarity is no accident: Gertrude Stein was Margaret Wise Brown’s favorite writer.

https://slate.com/culture/2015/12/goodnight-moon-and-modernism-margaret-wise-browns-debt-to-gertrude-stein.html

Have a lovely day,

A xx.