Photographs of Boyden Station in South Africa

The Harvard College Observatory was founded by the Harvard Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1839. Boyden Station was established in order to make astronomical observations from the Southern Hemisphere, and was originally located in Arequipa, Peru. The station was moved to a spot near Bloemfontien in the Orange Free State, South Africa in 1927 due to better weather conditions; the South African climate was considered better suited to astronomical observations because it had less cloud cover than Peru. The research activities at Boyden Station focused on photographic and photoelectric observations of stars and star fields in the Milky Way, the Magellanic Clouds, and variable stars in the Southern hemisphere. Astronomers at Boyden discovered several comets and asteroids. Financial issues at Harvard almost led to the closure of Boyden in 1954, but several European countries (Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Sweden) contributed to funding the observatory. Harvard, which had transferred the title to the Smithsonian Institution, withdrew its financial support in 1976, when the station was donated to the University of the Free State, which continues to operate the observatory today.

Elske van Panhuys Smith, astronomer and solar physicist, was born on November 9, 1929 in Monte Carlo, Monaco. She came to the United States in 1943 and received her B.S. in astronomy from Radcliffe College in 1950, her MA in 1951, and her PhD in 1956. She married Henry J. Smith in 1950; Smith served as Superintendent of the Boyden Station of the Harvard College Observatory in South Africa from 1952 to 1954. She was on the faculty at the University of Maryland for more than 15 years and was dean and director of the Center for Environmental Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. She retired in 1995 and returned to Massachusetts.