1847

Miss Mitchell’s Comet

Maria Mitchell (1818–1889)

Even though a pioneering path for women interested in science and astronomy had been established around the turn of the eighteenth century by the English astronomer Caroline Herschel, extremely few women were able to follow that path successfully for some time. Indeed, it would be more than another half century until the first female scientist made a professional academic career in astronomy.

That woman was Maria Mitchell, a native of Nantucket and a skilled observational astronomer and educator. Mitchell helped teach at a school that her father founded on the island and eventually became a librarian—soaking up the scientific and literary works of the time while continuing to enhance her experience observing the night sky. In 1847, using her father’s small observatory, she discovered a faint comet only visible via telescope. The comet was informally dubbed “Miss Mitchell’s comet.”

Mitchell was widely recognized for her astronomical work. She traveled to Europe to meet other astronomers and receive awards, and was eventually offered a job computing the positions of Venus for a nautical almanac publisher. She became the first female member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the first woman elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

As much as she must have loved astronomical research, she apparently never lost the passion for teaching that she had developed on Nantucket. When the wealthy New York businessman Matthew Vassar offered her a teaching position in 1865 at the new women’s university he founded, she took the offer and became not only Vassar College’s first faculty member but the world’s first female professor of astronomy. She became the director of the Vassar College Observatory and used the facility as a teaching tool for astronomy students, while at the same time conducting her own research on sunspots and the changing appearances of Jupiter, Saturn, and their moons. She taught on the Vassar faculty for 23 years, and trained scores of women who went on to pursue scientific careers. After her death, the Maria Mitchell Society was formed to preserve her legacy, and in 1908 the society opened the Maria Mitchell Observatory on Nantucket, a facility still dedicated to astronomical teaching and research.

SEE ALSO Encke’s Comet (1795).

Nantucket Historical Association photograph of comet hunter Maria Mitchell from around 1865, about the same time she became the world’s first female professor of astronomy.