Payne attended St Paul 's Girls ' School . In 1919 , she won a scholarship to Newnham College , Cambridge University , where she read botany , physics , and chemistry . Her interest in astronomy began after attending a lecture by Arthur Eddington on his 1919 expedition to the island of Principe in the Gulf of Guinea off the west coast of Africa to observe and photograph the stars near a solar eclipse as a test of Einstein 's general theory of relativity . She said of the lecture : ' The result was a complete transformation of my world picture . ... My world had been so shaken that I experienced something very like a nervous breakdown . ' She completed her studies , but was not awarded a degree because of her gender ; Cambridge did not grant degrees to women until 1948
1919 expedition
Solar eclipse of May 29, 1919
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin