Isis Pogson

Elizabeth Isis Pogson (28 September 1852 – 14 May 1945), daughter of Norman Pogson by his first marriage to Elizabeth Jane Ambrose (died 1869). Pogson was one of the first women elected as a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. Elizabeth Isis was probably named after the River Isis, the part of the River Thames that flows through Oxford.

Assisting astronomer in India Her father Norman Pogson was an assistant at Radcliffe Observatory and then at Hartwell Observatory. He discovered the asteroid 42 Isis on 23 May 1856, She was given the post of computer at the Madras Observatory in 1873 with the salary of 150 rupees, equivalent to a "cook or coach-man",

Fellowship of the Royal Astronomical Society Pogson was the first woman to attempt to be elected a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, being nominated (unsuccessfully) by her father and two other fellows in 1886. Although the society had elected a few women as honorary members, all the fellows had been male up to this time. Her nomination was withdrawn when two lawyers deemed female fellows illegal under the provisions of the society's royal charter dating from 1831, which referred to fellows only as he. Pogson (by then known by her married name Elizabeth Isis Kent) was successfully nominated in 1920 by Oxford professor H. H. Turner, five years after the Royal Astronomical Society first opened its doors to women.

Personal After retiring from astronomy, she married Herbert Clement Kent, a captain in the Merchant Navy,