Antonia Maury

Born on 21 March 1866 in Cold Spring, New York, Antonia Maury was an American astrophysicist who became known as a “master morphologist of stellar spectra.” Maury was exposed to science at a young age, in part because her grandfather, John William Draper, and uncle, Henry Draper, were both prominent physicians and amateur astrophotographers. Maury attended Vassar College, where she earned her BA in 1887 with honors in physics, astronomy, and philosophy. She then went to work for Edward Pickering at the Harvard College Observatory as one of Pickering’s famed Harvard computers , a group of women astronomers he hired to classify the vast number of stars being captured by new photographic technology. Maury initiated her own original research into such binary-star systems as Beta Lyrae and worked to refine the star classification system. Those efforts put her at odds with Pickering, so she left Harvard in 1891 to teach and lecture at other institutions. In 1897 she became the first woman to be credited in the Annals of the Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College when she published her catalog of 681 bright northern stars. In 1918 Maury was made an adjunct professor at Harvard, where she continued to work until her retirement in 1935. She was a member of the American Astronomical Society, the Royal Astronomical Society, and the National Audubon Society. In 1943 Maury received AAS’s Annie Jump Cannon Award. She died in 1952 at age 85. (Photo credit: Harvard College Observatory, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)

Date in History: 21 March 1866