I know it was meant as light weight chit-chat but I think Henrietta S. Leavitt, if she were alive, would be a little annoyed to hear you both you and Pessimippotamus say this.

As a female pioneer in the male dominated field of astronomy back at the turn of the last century, they tasked her with the tedious review of photographic plates for uncharted variable stars. The historical documentation is not clear but we get the impression she was given this grad student work because she was a women.

This was exactly the kind of astrometrical stuff that would be automated these days by programs described in the article above.

Luckily for her, she dug deeply into it and as a result figured out a rule for measuring distances to distant objects based on the luminosity of variable stars. This rule is now the chief method of determining distance to other galaxies--parallax is insufficient in these cases. Basically she figured out a clever way of really figuring out how big the visible universe actually is.

Had she been allowed to follow up on this discovery she might have beat Hubble to the punch in discovering that the universe was expanding.

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Ladies rock.

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