The twenty four Pişmiş open clusters make a delightful little observing project. A few of them are exquisitely bright and delicate, others appear as tiny glints of stars mingled with a faint hazy glow of unresolved starlight, and yet others appear as little more than a faint and tantalizing mistiness. They were discovered by Paris Pişmiş, a remarkable astronomer who played a significant role in enriching the field of astronomy.

Marie Paris Pişmiş de Recilas (1911-1999)

Marie Paris Pişmiş de Recilas (1911-1999) was born on January 30, 1911, in Istanbul, the daughter of an Armenian family of great prestige in their community. She completed her high school studies at Üsküdar American Academy. She was one of the first women to attend Istanbul University. She enrolled in the Faculty of Sciences and earned a PhD degree in Mathematics in 1937. Her supervisors were Professors R. Von Mises and Erwin Finley-Freundlich (she served as an interpreter and research assistant to Freundlich). As a student, Paris worked at the Istanbul University Observatory.

In 1938 Pişmiş travelled to the United States to become an assistant astronomer at Harvard College Observatory for a year. However, with the outbreak of World War II it did not seem advisable for her to return to Turkey so she stayed on at Harvard until 1942 when she married Félix Recillas, a Mexican astronomy student, and they moved to Mexico to join the recently founded Observatorio Astrofísico de Tonantzintla in Puebla. Pişmiş worked there until 1946. In 1948, she moved to Mexico City where she joined the Observatorio Astronómico Nacional at Tacubaya, which was part of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). For more than 50 years, she worked at UNAM where she became Astronomer Emerita in what is now known as the Instituto de Astronomía..

Pişmiş’ primary interest was galactic structure. She carried out some of the first photometric observations of young stellar clusters and discovered a globular cluster and 20 open clusters. She also studied the effects of interstellar absorption in stellar associations on the observed stellar distribution. She sought to explain the origin and development of the spiral structure of galaxies and to discover a reason for the waves of their rotation curves, based on different stellar populations. In 1972, Pişmiş introduced Fabry-Perot interferometry to Mexico to study the velocity field of galactic emission nebulae.

During her lifetime she visited over 20 nations, giving astronomical lectures in any of six languages – Turkish, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. In Mexico she supervised at least half a dozen PhD theses by graduate students at UNAM. She was a role model for women astronomers – of the approximately 80 astronomers at UNAM over the years, 25% were women. According to Dorrit Hoffleit (1907-2007) “she is the one person most influential in establishing Mexico’s importance in astronomical education and research”.

Pişmiş published her memoirs in 1998 under the title, Reminiscences in the Life of Paris Pişmiş: a Woman Astronomer (but alas, the book is long out of print and seems unobtainable).

Paris Pişmiş died in Mexico City on 1 August 1999.

Proof of her great commitment to her field can be seen in our southern skies… using the existing Schmidt plates of the Tonantzintla Observatory, she discovered 24 open clusters and 2 globular clusters, and published her Nuevos Cumulos Estelares en Regiones del Sur (New Southern Star Clusters) catalogue in 1959. Of the 24 open clusters, four had already been discovered: Pişmiş 1 (NGC 2568) was discovered by E.E. Barnard in 1881; John Herschel discovered Pişmiş 6 (NGC 2645) in 1834 and Pişmiş 9 (NGC 2659) in 1835; and Pişmiş 18 (IC 4291) was discovered by Robert Innes in 1901. The globular cluster Tonantzintla 1 (Pişmiş 25) is NGC 6380 which had been discovered by John Herschel in 1834, but Tonantzintla 2 (Pismis 26) was a new discovery.