Her mien was as plain and uncompromising as her treasured brass telescope, her life a long and relentless pursuit of the truth. At the age of twelve, Maria Mitchell observed an annular eclipse of the sun with her father, helping him to make and record his calculations, and for nearly six decades thereafter she was never out of touch with a telescope, nor her mind far from the heavens. She used to say it was an interest in mathematics—that and her father’s passion for astronomy—that started her sweeping the skies. But it was also the place she lived: Nantucket. On the island, people were in the habit of observing the heavens; everyone there was aware of the changes of the moon and stars, for to them the phrase “when my ship comes in” had a literal, not a figurative meaning. The majority of Nantucket men were gone, often for years at a time, to the vast, lonely waters where the sperm whale traveled; and as a consequence, it was customary for the women of the island to run businesses as well as households, to substitute for their absent men in nearly every way.

By day Maria taught school, urging her students to observe, to open their eyes, to question. By night she and her father watched the stars from the walk on top of their observations in a journal. On October 1, 1847, William Mitchell wrote in his notebook the words that were to bring his daughter worldwide fame: “This evening at half past ten Maria discovered a telescopic comet five degrees above Polaris. Persuaded that no nebula could occupy that position unnoticed, it scarcely needed the evidence of motion to give it the character of a comet.” This was her initial contribution to astronomy, and her achievement brought her a gold medal—an award established by Frederic VI, King of Denmark. It was the first such prize given to an American and the first to a woman anywhere. Maria quickly became known as the “Lady Astronomer”; she was the first woman elected to the America Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. With all her honors she continued to do housework, to serve as librarian at the Nantucket Athenaeum, and to make her observations every night, goaded by thoughts that “the world of learning is so broad and the human soul is so limited in power.” She realized that “we reach forward and strain every nerve, but we seize hold only of a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us.”

Late in August, 1862, she learned from Rufus Babcock, a trustee of the new women’s college founded by Matthew Vassar, that she was being considered for a position there. Since this was a time when women as well as men were disturbed by the idea of educating women, the new college was thought of—and not only by its Poughkeepsie neighbors—as “Vassar’s folly.” “Open the doors of