Maria Mitchell Research Paper

Maria Mitchell was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts on August 1, 1818, and was one of nine brothers and sisters. Her family were Quakers and believed in equal education for men and women. Maria attended local schools and was tutored by her father. He taught her how to use a telescope when she was twelve, and she helped him calculate exactly when the annual solar eclipse would be. By the time she was fourteen, she was writing directions for sailors’ whaling trips. She opened a school of her own when she was seventeen, but closed in 1834 when the Nantucket Atheneum library was founded, with eighteen-year-old Maria Mitchell as its first librarian. She and her father continued to conduct observations of the night sky. When her father was hired for a job as the cashier for the

The Association for the Advancement of Science did the same in 1850, and in 1849 the US Nautical Almanac Office hired her to calculate the position of Venus. Mitchell continued her career in science through the Civil War. in 1865, she joined the faculty of Vasser College where she was the only woman. The school gave her access to a twelve-inch telescope, and she began to study the surfaces of Jupiter and Saturn. During her career, she also observed sunspots, stars, solar eclipses, comets, nebulae, and the moons of Saturn and Jupiter.
Maria Mitchell died on June 28, 1889, at the age of seventy due to a brain disease. In 1902, her friends and supporters founded the Maria Mitchell Association. They also opened her home to visitors. She was elected to the Hall of Fame of Great Americans at New York University when it began in 1905, and in 1994, she became part of the National Women 's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. Astronomers even honored her by naming a crater on the moon after