At the end of her trailblazing life, having swung open the gate of the possible for women in science with her famous comet discovery, astronomer Maria Mitchell confided in one of her Vassar students that she would rather have authored a great poem than discovered a comet.

A century later, a little girl named Vera had a flash of illumination while reading a children’s book about Maria Mitchell: her nightly pastime of gazing wondersmitten at the stars outside her bedroom window could become a life’s work, work that would culminate in one of the greatest revelations in the history of science.

Vera Rubin confirmed the existence of dark matter by studying the rotation of galaxies. “I sometimes ask myself whether I would be studying galaxies if they were ugly,” she reflected in her most personal interview — a playful echo of Keats’s poignant postulate that “beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

A decade after Vera Rubin returned her borrowed stardust to the universe, the observatory named in her honor opens its oracle eye to the cosmos and blinks back at us the mysteries of ten million bright galaxies. Atop one of the first images captured by the VRO’s 8.4-meter telescope — 678 exposures of the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae taken over the course of seven hours, two trillion pixels of cosmic truth combined into a single gasp of beauty — I have remixed the text of the National Science Foundation press release into a poem using my bird divination process: