Star power

At first, Katharine Gebbie might remind you of a favorite great aunt, or your high school English teacher. She is thin, almost frail looking, with golden-gray hair pulled into a neat bun. Her graceful manner and perfect posture are matched by speech so soft and precise you mourn the fact that so few people really know how to use language anymore. But then she starts talking about planetary nebulae and thermodynamic equilibrium and modeling stellar atmospheres. That's when you realize Katharine Gebbie is like no one you've ever met.

Gebbie is an astrophysicist by training, but that only begins to explain who she is. She was born on the 4th of July in 1934. Her father was a Boston lawyer and her mother a homemaker. In an era when few women continued their education after high school, she followed in the footsteps of her mother and two aunts and went to Bryn Mawr College. She majored in physics-- the path taken by one of her aunts and namesake, Katharine Blodgett, the first woman to receive a degree in physics from Cambridge University and a pioneer in film technology.