Contributed by Dana Mildebrath — Paris, France

Today we celebrate the birth of the first female astronomer in the United States, Maria Mitchell.

The third of 10 children, Maria was born in 1818 on Nantucket Island, about 30 miles from Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her father William was a schoolteacher and amateur astronomer. Her mother Lydia was a library worker. William taught all the Mitchell children about astronomy and nature; Lydia’s jobs in two libraries gave the children access to a vast array of knowledge.

At the age of 12, Maria helped William calculate the exact moment of a solar eclipse.

When William opened his own school, Maria became a student there (as well as her father’s teaching assistant).  When her father’s school closed, she attended Unitarian minister Cyrus Peirce’s “School for Young Ladies” until she was 16.  Maria then worked for Peirce as his teaching assistant until she opened her own school at the age of 17. Although the local public school was still segregated, Maria allowed children of color to attend her school.

At the age of 29, Maria discovered a comet which later came to be known as “Miss Mitchell’s Comet.” (New York’s Metro North commuter railroad has a train named the Maria Mitchell Comet in her honor.)

Maria published a notice of her discovery in Silliman’s Journal in January 1848 under her father’s name.  However, later that year, she was honored in her own name at the now famous Seneca Falls Convention for Women’s Rights.  Organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her associates, the Convention launched the movement for women’s suffrage and the reform of laws subordinating women.

Maria became a celebrity, and hundreds of articles were written about her during the next decade. On what would have been her 195th birthday in 2013, Google posted a Google Doodle of her looking through a telescope in search of comets.

The founder of Vassar College appointed Maria professor of astronomy (she was the first faculty member) — even though she did not have a college education — when Maria was 47 years old. When she found out that she was being paid less than the male professors, she insisted that her salary be increased, and it was. She was also named director of the Vassar College Observatory, a position she held for more than 20 years.

Maria helped found the Association for the Advancement of Women (AAW) and was the first woman elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1994. Her telescope is on display in the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History and the Maria Mitchell Observatory is in Nantucket.

Maria Mitchell:  “We have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the more we are capable of seeing.”