She was the Director of the Bureau of Measurements at the Paris Observatory and was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, or a Knight of the National Order of the Legion of Honor.

[1][2][3][4][5][6] Roberts' father, John Gerard Klumpke (1825-1917), was a German immigrant who came to California in 1850 with the Gold Rush and later became a successful realtor in San Francisco.

Her sisters included Anna Elizabeth Klumpke, painter and companion to the French animal painter Rosa Bonheur; Julia Klumpke, a violinist and composer; Mathilda, an accomplished pianist and pupil of Marmontel; and the neurologist Augusta, who, with her physician husband, Joseph Jules Dejerine, established a clinic and wrote numerous papers.

[7] In 1887, she began working at the Paris Observatory alongside Guillaume Bigourdan and Lipót Schulhof, and later astrophotographers Paul and Prosper Henry.

This led to the Carte du Ciel project, which required photographing the entire sky and showing stars as faint as the 14th magnitude.

Roberts remained at the Sussex home and completed her photography of the 52 areas, after which she went to stay with her mother and sister Anna at Chateau Rosa Bonheur, taking along the entire set of photographic plates.

She returned to Paris Observatory and spent 25 years processing the plates and her husband’s notes, periodically publishing papers on the results.

In 1929, she published a comprehensive catalogue of the survey The Isaac Roberts Atlas of 52 Regions, a Guide to William Herschel's Fields of Nebulosity.

Through a donation of Roberts in honor of her late husband, the Société astronomique de France (the French Astronomical Society) established the Prix Dorothea Klumpke-Isaac Roberts (Klumpke-Roberts Award) for the encouragement of the study of the wide and diffuse nebulae of William Herschel, the obscure objects of Barnard, or the cosmic clouds of R.P.

On December 14, 1893, she read her doctoral thesis, L'étude des Anneaux de Saturne to a large audience of academics at the Sorbonne, and was awarded the degree of Docteur ès Sciences; the first woman to do so.