85% of My Work Is Invisible Too

They released this stunning Andromeda image today. Multiple telescopes, years of data, a tribute to Vera Rubin who discovered dark matter fifty years ago. The press release talks about how 85% of the universe is invisible matter we can't detect. I stared at my laptop screen in the empty lab at 11 PM, waiting for code to finish running. Again. 85% of what I do is invisible too. The failed experiments that never make it to papers. The grant rejections. The nights I've rewritten the same paragraph seventeen times. The hours spent debugging someone else's broken protocol. Rubin had to fight for telescope time when women weren't welcome. She discovered something that changed everything, and they're just now putting her on quarters and naming observatories after her. I wonder if she ever sat alone like this, staring at data, wondering if any of it mattered. If anyone would remember the invisible work that makes the beautiful images possible. The Andromeda photo is gorgeous. The sleepless nights that created it aren't. #LabLife #InvisibleWork #WomenInSTEM #Science