FYI: has nothing whatsoever to do with the beautiful images but is interesting. Keep in mind that the piece comes from Astronomy Magazine and so is sympathetic to Shapley. Most science authors/historians (obviously) lean to the left.
RED SCARE at Harvard : Harlow Shapley's thick FBI file suggests he was more than an accomplished astronomer; he was a dangerous character.
It was the spring of 1947, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation was hot on the trail of a suspected Communist. On March 28, Federal agents in Los Angeles sent word to Washington that the supposed Soviet sympathizer had sent a letter to a prominent scientist.
The suspicious letter was addressed to Edwin Hubble. It had been sent by Harlow Shapley.
Two of America's greatest astronomers, these men are largely responsible for our current understanding of the structure of the universe and the solar system's place in it. But to the FBI, Shapley was a dangerous character.
Records show that for two months in 1947, FBI agents recorded the addresses of every piece of mail that Shapley sent or received. One of those letters went to his old Mt. Wilson colleague, Hubble.
This extraordinary surveillance was just part of the seven years of government spying on Shapley that ended in 1953, a year after he retired as Harvard College Observatory's director. Copies of Shapley's 461-page FBI dossier continued to be shared with various federal agencies well into the 1960s. (Shapley died in 1972.) At the height of the FBI's monitoring, however, when agents were aware of even minute details of his life, Shapley told a friend that he doubted the agency was following him.
That's in the massive file, too.
Astronomy obtained Shapley's FBI file with a Freedom of Information Act request. The dossier shows that FBI agents relied on informants at Harvard, moles in the astronomical community, and infiltrators in national political organizations to watch Shapley closely. The FBI even spied on the 1946 convention of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, which Shapley attended. (FBI agents were concerned that Shapley was trying to recruit the AAVSO members to turn their mild-mannered pursuit of measuring star brightnesses to something more nefarious. What this activity might have been is not clearly spelled out in the file.) But after seven years of eavesdropping, the FBI could not establish that Shapley was - or had ever been - a member of the Communist Party.
What does emerge from the file is a complex portrait of an astronomer who didn't like what his government was doing with nuclear arms, a fiercely independent and passionate man who used his position as one of the most visible of American scientists to battle the pogroms of the red-baiting House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joseph P. McCarthy. What appeared suspicious to post-war FBI agents -- Shapley's concern for war refugees and for the welfare of foreign scientists, as well as Shapley's vocal opposition to lynchings of blacks in the South -- seem like ringing ...
No bias there, no sir. And who knew a Senator who spent most of his time in the minority was Chairman of a House committee.
Why *anything* outside our Milky Way galaxy would be named after Shapley is itself mysterious — Shapley’s (in)famous for arguing that the Milky Way was the entire universe, and that other galaxies were A) closer than some calculated and B) part of a Milky Way much larger than is accepted today. Shapley’s view that the Milky Way is larger than was (at the time) accepted doesn’t mean (as one will find on the web) that “both were right” — it means Shapley was dead wrong about *everything* except the general idea that the Milky Way was a ilttle larger than accepted, but much, much smaller than he claimed — and that he claimed the larger size in order to prop up his a priori belief that the Milky Way was the entire universe.
http://apod.nasa.gov/diamond_jubilee/debate_1920.html
And yes, Shapley and his associates all read (and contributed to I think) a Marxist hate sheet called “The Compass”.