MARIA

MITCHELL (1818—1889)  , American astronomer, was born of Quaker ancestry on the island of Nantucket on the 1st of August 1818 . Her father, William Mitchell (1791—1869), was a school teacher and self-taught astronomer, who rated chronometers for Nantucket whalers, was an overseer of Harvard University (1857—1865), and for a time was employed by the United States Coast Survey . As early as 1831 (during the annular eclipse of the sun) she had been her father's assistant in his observations . On the 1st of October 1847 she discovered a telescopic comet (seen by De Vico Oct . 3, by W . R . Dawes Oct . 7, by Madame Rumker Oct . 11), and for this discovery she received a gold medal from the King of Denmark, and was elected (1848) to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and (185o) to the American Association for the Advancement of Science . In 1861 she removed from Nantucket to Lynn, where she used a large equatorial telescope presented to her by the women of America; and there she lived until 1865, when she became professor of astronomy and director of the observatory at Vassar College; in 1888 she became professor emeritus . In 1874 she began making photographs of the sun, and for years she made a special study of Jupiter and Saturn . She died at Lynn on the 28th of June 1889 .

In 1908 an observatory was established in her

honour at Nantucket . See Phebe Mitchell Kendall, Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters and Journals (Boston, 1896); In Memoriam (Poughkeepsie, 1889), by her pupil and successor at Vassar, Mary W . Whitney; and a sketch by her brother, Henry Mitchell (1830-1902), himself a well-known hydrographer, in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. xxv . (1889-189o), pp . 331-343 .