Harvard College Observatory Annals Vol. 79 formally acknowledged Leavitt's death and her pioneering work on Cepheid variables in the Small Magellanic Cloud.
In February 1922, roughly two months after Henrietta Swan Leavitt's death, the Harvard College Observatory published Annals, Volume 79, Part 1, titled "Periods of 25 Variable Stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud." This publication, prepared under the direction of Harlow Shapley, included a formal memoir and acknowledgment of Leavitt's death, alongside a summary of her pioneering contributions to the study of Cepheid variable stars.
This posthumous recognition was significant because, during her lifetime, Leavitt's discoveries had been published primarily under the name of Observatory director Edward Pickering, a common practice for the era's institutional "computers"—a term used for the women employed to perform detailed calculations and data analysis, often without full authorial credit. The 1922 Annals memoir represented one of the first formal institutional efforts to memorialize Leavitt specifically and to ensure her name was permanently and explicitly attached to the body of variable-star research she had produced over more than two decades.
This publication helped preserve the documentary record of Leavitt's meticulous work at a critical historical juncture, ensuring that as astronomers like Edwin Hubble and others built upon the period-luminosity relationship to revolutionize cosmology in subsequent years, there remained a formal institutional record crediting Leavitt as its originator, a crucial foundation for her later, fuller historical recognition.