Leila Belkora
Leila is a science writer currently living in southern California. She has a B.A. in physics and M. Eng. in engineering physics from Cornell, and a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Colorado Boulder.
Minding The Heavens
This book is about the discovery of the Milky Way galaxy. Leila tells the story of the discovery of our own and other galaxies through the lives of seven astronomers who contributed to our present understanding.
Other Writing
Leila’s other writing includes technical papers on solar astronomy, articles in StarDate magazine about topics such as meteorite analysis, and an article about bird watching in Brittany.
Get In Touch
If you have questions about Minding The Heavens or any of the resources listed, use this form to contact Leila.
“The deepest portrait of the visible universe ever achieved by humankind.”
This Hubble Ultra Deep Field image is “the deepest portrait of the visible universe ever achieved by humankind,” according to the Hubble Space Telescope team. The image probes billions of light-years to depict almost 10,000 galaxies of different ages, colors, shapes, and sizes.
Read an excerpt from minding the heavens
Mastermind without a Telescope
Jacobus Kapteyn, a plainly dressed, thin man with a long neck and heavy eyelids, sat in animated conversation with his fellow travelers in the third-class compartment of a train. He spoke in the dialect of Groningen, a small provincial capital in the Netherlands, although he came from Barneveld, farther to the south. His seatmates, who were mostly traveling salesmen, had all but forgotten that he was not one of them but a highly educated professor of astronomy, a teacher and a researcher who, like other university professors, had been appointed to his post by the Crown. University faculty members were rarely seen outside of the first class compartments.
The train clanked and screeched to a halt at Groningen, and Kapteyn hastily concluded his conversation. He threaded his way among the salesmen’s large black bags and jumped off the train, quite forgetting his own luggage. This was not unusual; he routinely misplaced his wallet and forgot appointments, and his wife categorically refused to buy any more umbrellas because he promptly lost them.
A salesman ran after him, calling out, “Professor! You forgot your bag of samples!” Kapteyn stopped and acknowledged the man’s help. “Thank you very much! But these are not samples, you know.”
The salesman replied, “Well then, if you wish, your bag of stars!”
The story, one of many fondly recalled by Kapteyn’s friends, illustrates several of the personality traits that made him a much-loved figure among his neighbors and among astronomers all over the world. And the salesman’s joke about the bag of stars is closer to the truth than he realized, for Kapteyn made it his specialty to study the known universe through representative samples of stars from around the celestial sphere. Throughout his career at Groningen, Kapteyn painstakingly added data to his “bag of stars” until, near the end of his life, he could pull out a carefully wrought model of the stellar system, the so-called “Kapteyn Universe.”
(Excerpt from Chapter 6)