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Maria Mitchell ( ; August 1, 1818 – June 28, 1889) was an American astronomer, librarian, naturalist, and educator. 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. 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. 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.
Mitchell is the namesake of the Maria Mitchell Association, the Maria Mitchell Observatory, and the Maria Mitchell Aquarium.
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 of the island.
After attending Elizabeth Gardner small school as a young child, Mitchell enrolled in the North Grammar school, where her father was the first principal. When Maria Mitchell 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. Among The Stars: The Life of Maria Mitchell. Mill Hill Press, Nantucket, MA. 2007 In 1831, at the age of 12, Mitchell aided her father in calculating the exact moment of a solar eclipse.Gormley, Beatrice. Maria Mitchell: The Soul of an Astronomer. Eerdmans Publishing Co, MI. 1995., 1899Howe, Julia Ward. Reminiscences, 1819 – 2020, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1900.|left|352x352px]]
William Mitchell's school closed, and afterwards she attended Unitarianism minister Cyrus Peirce's school for young ladies until she was about the age of 16. Later, she worked for Peirce as his teaching assistant before opening her own school in 1835. Mitchell developed experimental teaching methods, which she later employed during her professorship at Vassar College. She allowed nonwhite children to attend her school, though the local public school was still racially segregated.
In 1836, Mitchell began working as the first librarian of the Nantucket Atheneum, a position she held for 20 years. The institution's limited operating hours enabled Mitchell to assist her father with a series of astronomical observations and geographical calculations for the United States Coast Survey and to continue her own education. 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. In addition to looking for and , the pair produced latitudes and longitudes by calculating the altitudes of stars and the culminations and occultations of the Moon, respectively.
In 1843, Mitchell converted to Unitarianism, although she did not physically attend a Unitarian Church until more than twenty years later. Her departure from the Quaker faith did not cause a break with her family, with whom she appears to have remained close. Historians have limited knowledge about this period in Mitchell's life because few of her personal documents remain from before 1846. Members of the Mitchell family believed she destroyed many of her personal documents in order to keep them private, having witnessed personal papers blown through the street by the Great Fire of 1846, and because fear of another fire persisted.
On October 6, 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. 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. Mitchell was declared the first to discover the comet and she was awarded the prize. The only previous women to discover a comet were the astronomers Caroline Herschel and Maria Margarethe Kirch.
Mitchell's medal was inscribed with line 257 of Book I of Virgil's Georgics: " Non Frustra Signorum Obitus Speculamur et Ortus" (Not in vain do we watch the setting and the rising of). Though the award was sent via letter in 1848, Mitchell did not physically receive the award in Nantucket until March 1849. She became the first American to receive this medal and the first woman to receive an award in astronomy.
Mitchell traveled to Europe in 1857. While abroad, Mitchell toured the observatories of contemporary European astronomers John Herschel and Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville. She also spoke with a number of natural philosophers including Alexander von Humboldt, William Whewell, and Adam Sedgwick before continuing her travels with Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family. 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.
Mitchell employed many unconventional teaching methods in her classes. She reported neither grades nor absences, advocated for small classes and individualized attention, and incorporated technology and mathematics into her lessons. Though her students' career options were limited by their gender, she emphasized 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."
Mitchell's research interests were varied. She photographed planets such as Jupiter and Saturn, as well as their moons, and studied nebulae, double stars, and solar eclipses. Mitchell also 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. Mitchell often involved her students with her astronomical observations in both the field and the Vassar College Observatory. Though she began recording by eye in 1868, she and her students began photographing them daily in 1873. 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. 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.
After teaching at Vassar for some time, Mitchell discovered that she was being paid less than many younger male professors. Mitchell and Alida Avery, the only other woman on the faculty at that time, demanded a salary increase, which they received. She taught at the college until her retirement in 1888, one year before her death.
Mitchell advocated for women working part-time while studying to make them more independent, as well as to increase their skills. 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 serve on local school boards. Mitchell served as the second president of the AAW in 1875 and 1876 before stepping down to head a special Committee on Science to analyze and promote women's progress in the field. She held this position until her death in 1889.
In 1989, Mitchell was named a National Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Project and was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1994. 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. 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.
Her unique place at the intersection of American science and culture has been captured in a number of recent publications. (2019). 9781524748135, Pantheon Books. ISBN 9781524748135
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