Beverly Turner Lynds, 1929–2024

American astronomer Beverly T. Lynds died peacefully on October 5, 2024, at a hospice in Portland, Oregon, after suffering a stroke in early September. She was 95 years old. 

Beverly Turner was born on August 19, 1929, in Shreveport, Louisiana, but moved to New Orleans at age three. She attended high school there, before moving to Shreveport to attend Centenery College. There, she decided she wanted to become a professional astronomer. She applied to four graduate astronomy programs and was admitted to three. However, shortly after she accepted a position at the University of Chicago, the offer was withdrawn because they’d discovered that she was a female graduate student; Beverley (different spelling) is an uncommon male name.

To gain more experience in astronomy, she instead obtained a position as assistant at Lick Observatory, where she assisted Nicholas Mayall in measuring the radial velocities of galaxies and George Herbig with spectroscopic programs using the 36-inch refractor.  She was subsequently admitted to the graduate astronomy program at University of California, Berkeley. She earned her Ph.D. in 1955 with a thesis on the spectra of white dwarfs.  She also married fellow astronomy graduate student C. Roger Lynds in 1954.

In 1960, the Lynds moved to the new National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Greenbank, West Virginia, where she assisted director Otto Struve in writing an astronomy textbook. Struve also charged her with building an astronomy library from scratch, which became an important resource for the observatory prior to the internet.

When she ordered a copy of the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey Number 1, acquired with that observatory’s 48-inch Schmidt telescope, she immediately noted how well the dark nebulae showed up on the plates. She decided she could compile a catalogue of dark clouds of dust and gas that, due to advances in technology, would be superior to the  dark nebula catalog published by E.E. Barnard in 1927.

She spent countless hours tracing the outlines of all of the dark nebulae she could see on the Palomar plates onto tracing paper. She recorded their coordinates, measured their areas with a calibrated planimeter, and estimated their darkness on a scale of 1-6. Her catalog, published in the Astrophysical Journal in 1962, far surpassed Barnard’s, with 1,802 dark nebulae, and is now regarded as a landmark catalog on par with the Messier, New General, Index, and Sharpless catalogs. It currently has nearly 1,000 citations in the scientific literature. She subsequently repeated this process with emission and reflection (but not planetary) nebulae as well as supernova remnants, publishing that catalog of bright nebulae in the Astrophysical Journal in 1965. 

Lynds went on to study the connection between bright and dark nebulae, finding their relationship easier to analyze in other galaxies than from our limited view within a spiral arm of our Milky Way. Alan Sandage lent her Hubble’s collection of glass-plate exposures for her work. Astronomer C.C. Lin found her work supportive of his density wave theory for the formation of spiral arms in galaxies.

Lynds subsequently studied dust in Messier 20, the Trifid Nebula, for the first time, using then-new CCD imaging technology. She also became Assistant Director of Kitt Peak National Observatory. 

After retirement, she devoted much of her time to science education and reducing racial and gender disparities. She served as a Shapley Lecturer for the American Astronomical Society, specifying she only wanted to visit minority colleges. In 2013, she received the Education and Outreach Award from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. 

Lynds is survived by her daughter, Susan Elizabeth Lynds.