Maria Mitchell swept the skies from a Nantucket rooftop until, one October night in 1847, a comet swam into her telescope and made her famous. Life, Letters, and Journals assembles her own words — the Quaker childhood, the gold medal from the King of Denmark, Europe with the Herschels, and the Vassar professorship where she trained a generation of American women scientists.
Her journal voice is dry, exacting and quietly funny — a working astronomer to the bone. Download the free EPUB and meet America’s first woman of the telescope.