The women were often tasked with measuring the brightness, position, and color of stars. The work included such tasks as classifying stars by comparing the photographs to known catalogs and reducing the photographs while accounting for things like atmospheric refraction in order to render the clearest possible image. Fleming herself described the work as "so nearly alike that there will be little to describe outside ordinary routine work of measurement, examination of photographs, and of work involved in the reduction of these observations". At times women offered to work at the observatory for free in order to gain experience in a field that was difficult to get into.