Maria Mitchell (/məˈraɪə/;[1] August 1, 1818 – June 28, 1889) was an

American astronomer, librarian, naturalist, and educator.[2] In 1847, she discovered a comet named

1847 VI (modern designation C/1847 T1) that was later known as “Miss Mitchell’s Comet” in her
honor.[3] She won a gold medal prize for her discovery, which was presented to her by King Christian
VIII of Denmark in 1848. Mitchell was the first internationally known woman to work as both a
professional astronomer and a professor of astronomy after accepting a position at Vassar
College in 1865.[4][5] She was also the first woman elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.[4][6]

Contents

 1Early years (1818-1846)

 2Discovery of "Miss Mitchell's Comet" (1846-1849)
 3Intermediate years (1849-1864)
 4Professorship at Vassar College (1865-1888)
 5Social issues
 6Death and honors
 7See also
 8References
o 8.1Online sources
o 8.2Printed sources
 9External links

Early years (1818-1846)[edit]

Maria Mitchell[7]

Maria Mitchell was born on August 1, 1818, in Nantucket, (which is 30 miles away from Cape Cod),
Massachusetts to Lydia Coleman Mitchell, a library worker, and William Mitchell, a schoolteacher
and amateur astronomer.[8] The third of ten children, Mitchell and her siblings were raised in
the Quaker religion, a faith with tenets valuing education and sensible work.[6] Her father educated all
his children about nature and astronomy and her mother’s employment at two libraries gave them
access to a variety of knowledge.[9][10] Mitchell particularly showed both an interest in and a talent for
astronomy and advanced mathematics. Her father taught her to operate a number of astronomical
instruments including chronometers, sextants, simple refracting telescopes, and Dolland telescopes.
[8][9]
 Mitchell often assisted her father in his work with local seamen and in his observations of the
night sky.[8]
Mitchell's parents, like other Quakers, valued education and insisted on giving her the same access
to education as boys received. She was fortunate that her father was a dedicated public school
teacher who pursued an interest in mathematics and astronomy; he saw to it that Mitchell, who
especially showed interest and talent, and all his children were indoctrinated with knowledge of
astronomy.[9] Additionally, Nantucket's importance as a whaling port meant that wives of sailors were
left for months, sometimes years, to manage affairs at home while their husbands were at sea, thus
fostering an atmosphere of relative independence and equality for the women who called the island
home.[11]
After attending Elizabeth Gardner small school in her earliest childhood years, Mitchell attended the
North Grammar school, where William Mitchell was the first principal. Two years following the
founding of that school, when she was 11 years old, her father founded his own school on Howard
Street. There, she was a student and also a teaching assistant to her father.[12] At home, her father
taught her astronomy using his personal telescope.[13] At age 12 1/2 she aided her father in
calculating the exact moment of a solar eclipse, in 1831.[14][8]
Her father's school closed, and afterwards she attended Unitarian minister Cyrus Peirce's school for
young ladies until she was 16.[6] Later, she worked for Peirce as his teaching assistant before she
opened her own school in 1835. Mitchell developed experimental teaching methods, which she
practiced in her future teaching positions.[6] She made the decision to allow nonwhite children to
attend her school, a controversial move as the local public school was still segregated at the time.[15]
Mitchell began working as the first librarian of the Nantucket Atheneum in 1836 and held this position
for 20 years.[15][16][6] The institution’s limited operating hours enabled her to assist her father with a
series of astronomical observations and geographical calculations for the U.S. Coast Survey and to
continue her own education.[6][5] Mitchell and her father worked in a small observatory constructed on
the roof of the Pacific Bank building with a four-inch equatorial telescope provided by the survey.[6]
[5]
 In addition to looking for nebulae and double stars, the pair produced latitudes and longitudes by
calculating the altitudes of stars and the culminations and occultations of the moon, respectively.[6]
Few of her personal documents remain from before 1846. The Mitchell family believes she
witnessed personal papers of fellow Nantucketers blown through the street by the Great Fire of
1846, and because fear of another fire persisted, she burned her own documents to keep them
private.[17]

Discovery of "Miss Mitchell's Comet" (1846-1849) [edit]

Maria Mitchell (seated) inside the dome of the Vassar College Observatory, with her student Mary Watson
Whitney (standing), circa 1877[18]

At 10:50 pm on the night of October 1, 1847, Mitchell discovered Comet 1847 VI (modern
designation C/1847 T1) using a Dollond refracting telescope with three inches of aperture and forty-
six inch focal length.[19][20] She had noticed the unknown object flying through the sky in an area where
she previously had not noticed any other activity and believed it to be a comet.[5] The comet later
became known as “Miss Mitchell’s Comet”.[21][22] Mitchell published a notice of her discovery
in Silliman's Journal in January 1848 under her father's name.[23] The following month, she submitted
her calculation of the comet's orbit, ensuring her claim as the original discoverer.[23] Mitchell was
celebrated at the Seneca Falls Convention for the discovery and calculation later that year.[23]
In 1848, Mitchell was awarded a gold medal prize for her discovery by King Christian VIII of
Denmark. This award had been previously established by King Frederick VI of Denmark to honor the
“first discoverer“ of each new telescopic comet, a comet too faint to be seen with the naked eye.[6] A
question of credit temporarily arose because Francesco de Vico had independently discovered the
same comet two days after Mitchell but reported it to European authorities first. The question was
resolved in Mitchell’s favor and she was awarded the prize.[24] Her medal was inscribed with line 257
of Book I of Virgil’s Georgics: “Non Frustra Signorum Obitus Speculamur et Ortus” (English: Not in
vain do we watch the setting and the rising [of the stars]). [25] The only previous women to discover a
comet were the astronomers Caroline Herschel and Maria Margarethe Kirch.

Intermediate years (1849-1864)[edit]

Mitchell became a celebrity following her discovery and awards, with hundreds of newspaper articles
written about her in the subsequent decade.[23][26] At her home in Nantucket, she entertained a number
of prominent academics of the time such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Frederick
Douglass, and Sojourner Truth.[5][27] In 1849, Mitchell accepted a computing position for the U.S.
Coast Survey undertaken at the U.S. Nautical Almanac Office.[9] Her work consisted of tracking the
movements of the planets - particularly Venus - and compiling tables of their positions to assist
sailors in navigation.[9]
Mitchell traveled to Europe in 1857. While abroad, Mitchell toured the observatories of contemporary
European astronomers Sir John and Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville.[6] She also spoke with a
number of natural philosophers including Alexander von Humboldt, William Whewell, and Adam
Sedgewick before continuing her travels with Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family.[6] Mitchell never
married, but remained close to her immediate family throughout her life, even living in Lynn,
Massachusetts with her sister Kate and her family in 1888.[28]

Professorship at Vassar College (1865-1888) [edit]

Though Mitchell herself did not have a college education, she was appointed professor of astronomy
at Vassar College by its founder, Matthew Vassar, in 1865.[7] Mitchell was the first person appointed
to the faculty and was also named director of the Vassar College Observatory, a position she held
for more than two decades.[29][18] Mitchell also edited the astronomical column of Scientific
American during her professorship.[6] Thanks in part to Mitchell's guidance, Vassar College enrolled
more students in mathematics and astronomy than Harvard University from 1865 to 1888.[24]
Mitchell maintained many of her unconventional teaching methods in her classes: she reported
neither grades nor absences; she advocated for small classes and individualized attention; and she
incorporated technology and mathematics in her lessons.[7] Though her students’ career options were
limited, she never doubted the importance of their study of astronomy. “I cannot expect to make
astronomers,” she said to her students, “but I do expect that you will invigorate your minds by the
effort at healthy modes of thinking. When we are chafed and fretted by small cares, a look at the
stars will show us the littleness of our own interests”.[30]
Mitchell’s own research interests were quite varied. She took pictures of planets, such
as Jupiter and Saturn, as well as their moons, and she studied nebulae, double stars, and solar
eclipses.[31][7] Mitchell then developed theories around her observations, such as the revolution of one
star around another in double star formations and the influence of distance and chemical
composition in star color variation.[31] Mitchell often involved her students with her astronomical
observations in both the field and the Vassar College Observatory.[31] Though she began
recording sunspots by eye in 1868, she and her students began photographing them daily in 1873.
[31]
 These were the first regular photographs of the sun, and they allowed her to explore the
hypothesis that sunspots were cavities rather than clouds on the surface of the sun. For the
total solar eclipse of July 29, 1878 Mitchell and five assistants traveled with a 4-inch telescope to
Denver for observations.[23] Her efforts contributed to the success of Vassar’s science and astronomy
graduates, as twenty-five of her students would go on to be featured in Who’s Who in America.[7]
After teaching at Vassar for some time, she learned that despite her reputation and experience, her
salary was less than that of many younger male professors. Mitchell and Alida Avery, the only other
woman on the faculty at that time, insisted on a salary increase, and got it.[32][33] She taught at the
college until her retirement in 1888, one year before her death.

Social issues[edit]
In 1843, Mitchell left the Quaker faith and began to follow Unitarian principles, during which time she
also became involved in the anti-slavery movement by refusing to wear clothes made of Southern
cotton. She later became involved in a number of social issues as a professor, particularly those
pertaining to women’s suffrage and education.[4] She befriended various suffragists
including Elizabeth Cady Stanton. After returning from a trip to Europe in 1873, Mitchell joined the
national women’s movement and helped found the Association for the Advancement of Women
(AAW), a group dedicated to educational reform and the promotion of women in higher education.
[6]
 Mitchell addressed the Association’s First Women’s Congress in a speech titled The Higher
Education of Women in which she described the work of English women working for access to
higher education at Girton College, University of Cambridge.[4][6] She also called attention to the place
for women in science and mathematics and encouraged others to support women’s colleges and
women’s campaigns to reside on local school boards.[4][6] Mitchell served as the second president of
the AAW in 1875 and 1876 before stepping down to form and head a special Committee on Science
to promote and analyze women’s progress in the field.[4][6] She held this position until her death in
1889.[4][6]

Death and honors[edit]

In 1848, Mitchell became the first woman elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences.[30] She joined the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1850 and
befriended many of its members, including the director of the Smithsonian Institution, Joseph Henry.
In 1869, Mitchell joined Mary Somerville and Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz in becoming some of the first
women elected to the American Philosophical Society. Hanover College, Columbia University, and
Rutgers Female College granted Mitchell honorary degrees.[6]
During her life, Mitchell published seven items in the Royal Society Catalog and three articles
detailing her observations in Silliman's Journal.[6] Mitchell also authored three popular articles
for Hours at Home, Century, and the Atlantic.[6]

Maria Mitchell's telescope, on display in the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History

Mitchell died of brain disease on June 28, 1889 at the age of 70 in Lynn, Massachusetts. She was
buried in Lot 411, in Prospect Hill Cemetery, Nantucket.[34][35] An organization, the Maria Mitchell
Association, was established in Nantucket to preserve the sciences on the island and Mitchell’s
work.[6] The Association operates a natural history museum, aquarium, Science Library, Maria
Mitchell’s Home Museum, and an observatory named in her honor, the Maria Mitchell Observatory.[36]
Mitchell was made a National Women's History Month Honoree for 1989 by the National Women's
History Project and was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1994 [29] She was the
namesake of a World War II Liberty ship, the SS Maria Mitchell, and New York's Metro
North commuter railroad (with its Hudson Line endpoint in Poughkeepsie near Vassar College) has a
train named the Maria Mitchell Comet. A crater on the moon was also named in her honor.[6] On
August 1, 2013, the search engine Google honored Maria Mitchell with a Google Doodle showing
her in cartoon form on top of a roof gazing through a telescope in search of comets.[37][38][39]
Her unique place at the intersection of American science and culture has been vividly captured in a
number of recent publications. In Maria Popova's recent book Figuring, published in 2019, Maria
Mitchell serves as the backbone through which she explores how the personal lives of women
scientists and artists interact with their professional passions.[40] Her life is also brilliantly illustrated in
a children's book written by Hayley Barrett and illustrated by Diana Sudkya called What Miss Mitchell
Saw.[41]