Dean chats with author Maria Popova about the first recognized female astronomer in the United States, Maria Mitchell. Listen to learn about her exciting comet discovery, and the best way to catch a comet sighting yourself! New episodes release every other Friday!
Additional resources referenced in this episode:
- October 1, 1847: Miss Mitchell’s Comet and How Scientists Stand in Solidarity
- WAVE-TV 1996: 3/13/96 11PM Weather Comet Hyakutake Update
- NASA: Comet Halley Returns
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Looking Up is transcribed using a combination of AI speech recognition and human editors. It may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
Dean Regas: [00:00:00] It's October 1st, 1847, and there's an astronomer on a rooftop scanning the skies with her telescope.
Maria Popova: What is called sweeping, moving the telescope side to side across the sky, just observing.
Dean Regas: Looking for a comet.
Maria Popova: And then she saw it.
Dean Regas: From the studios of Cincinnati Public Radio, I'm your host, Dean Regas, and this is Looking Up.
The show that takes you deep into the cosmos, or just to the telescope in your backyard, to learn more about what makes this amazing universe of ours so great.
NASA Educational Video: Through space exploration, we continue to propel ourselves along the path of knowledge [00:01:00] and comprehension. By studying comets, we may unravel many questions about the early history of our sun and solar system.
Dean Regas: The origin stories of astronomers so often are wrapped around comets. These nighttime visitors that just hang there, kind of ominously, kind of amazingly. I can remember my first real amazing comet that I saw, which wasn't Halley's comet. I was kind of disappointed by Halley's comet. People out there that are that old probably think the same thing.
Louisville News Anchor (1996): I want to give you an update on this comet Hyakutake.
Dean Regas: It was a comet in 1996 called Hyakutake that really got me.
Louisville News Anchor (1996): We have had several reports now. That the comet has been sighted through binoculars here in the Louisville area.
Dean Regas: I really wasn't into astronomy at that point in my life. But this comet appeared, and I was mesmerized by this thing. It's just this little bluish light. Just a comet head [00:02:00] visible at this point. That you could see and not see at the same time, and it was...
Louisville News Anchor (1996): Without a telescope, without binoculars.
Dean Regas: This is kind of how I got started in astronomy, was seeing that.
So how do you find a comet? Boy, I wish I had better tips for you because we have had a comet drought. We have not had a significantly bright comet in the sky since 1996. We've had some pretenders that have come along that we thought would be bright enough, but never made it. And some that claim to be bright, but weren't.
And so, yeah, we're due.
Hello. How are you doing?
Maria Popova: Hi Dean! I'm great. How are you?
Dean Regas: Doing well, doing well Our guest this week is the acclaimed author Maria Popova her decades long blog The Marginalian is a love letter to science and a self described record of reckoning her LA Times [00:03:00] award winning book Figuring spotlights Maria Mitchell the United State's first recognized female astronomer and the subject of today's episode
Glad to talk to you today. This is going to be fun.
Maria Popova: Thank you guys for caring about Maria Mitchell.
Dean Regas: Oh, definitely. We're going to dive into the life and works of Maria Mitchell, who is, you know, arguably the first woman in the United States officially recognized as an astronomer. And so for folks that might not be as familiar with her, what are, what are her major accomplishments or what are the things that she did that stand out to you?
Maria Popova: Well, classically, she celebrated as the first professional female astronomer in the United States. She was also the first woman hired by the U. S. government for what they call the specialized non domestic skill.
So she was hired as a computer of Venus doing very complex astrophysics, astronomical calculations[00:04:00] to help sailors navigate the world. Basically a one woman GPS system. She was the first woman admitted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In fact, when I visited her childhood home in Nantucket, which is now a museum, the certificate of admission hangs on the wall.
And on it, the word Sir is crossed out, As is the word fellow and written in pencil over it is. honorary member because they just didn't have the language for the certificate to apply to a woman. And she also taught astronomy at Vassar College for a long time. She was trained as an astronomer, but she was really a pioneer of what we now call astrophysics, because she incorporated very advanced mathematics in her curriculum at a time when Harvard had dropped the mathematics requirement past the freshman year.
So the men getting educated in science at Harvard were getting a much inferior education. And in fact, Harvard eventually copied her curriculum [00:05:00] and she just changed the course of higher education for the whole country and the women who graduated out of her program, it's safe to say, are the world's first class of what we now call astrophysicists.
Dean Regas: Well, so let's go back to October 1st, 1847, and this was the, the date where Maria Mitchell discovered a comet. Can you set the scene a little bit for us and describe the night of her discovery?
Maria Popova: When Maria was 12, the king of Denmark announced this big prize, a gold medal worth 20 ducats, which was a lot of money, for the first person to discover a new telescopic comet. Which is actually, it's quite a challenging thing to do, because you have to... Observe very patiently for a very long time, you have to be familiar with everything else that is already there in the sky in order to recognize this [00:06:00] new apparition.
And so, between the time she was 12 and the time she was 29, that October day in 1847, she went up to her roof every night and swept the sky.
And then that night she was having dinner with her family. They had moved from their little house to a dwelling on top of the Nantucket bank building. So she excused herself from dinner as she did every night and took her telescope, hauled it up to the observation deck on the roof and started what is called sweeping, moving the telescope side to side across the sky, just observing.
And then she saw it.
And she... Was kind of startled. She didn't she wasn't sure that it was a new comet, but but she was so intimately familiar with the [00:07:00] objects in the sky that that she could tell us something new. She called her father up and they looked at it together and they were sure it was indeed a new telescopic comet.
So then. He begged her to announce it as her own discovery, and she was very reluctant. She was raised in the Quaker tradition. She was just constitutionally a very humble person. And she felt it was an act of ego, and so she didn't want to do it. Her father then persuaded her that it would be really a patriotic act,
you know, a great discovery claimed for American science, which was fairly young and unproven so she agreed and they Wrote a letter announcing the discovery And they put in the post However living on nantucket a little island [00:08:00] beholden to the weather a storm interfered And The mail was delayed for two days, in the course of which another astronomer in Europe observed the comet and promptly announced it, and his letter got to the King of Denmark.
Eventually, when Maria's announcement made it to Harvard and the head of the Harvard Observatory then corresponded with Europe, there was this beautiful and very moving act of solidarity by the global scientific community saying, Well, wait a minute. She shouldn't be discounted from the competition on a technicality.
She saw it first. The king had already awarded the medal to the Italian astronomer who announced it two days later. But there was this beautiful consensus that she was the one to actually get the prize. And she did. They gave her the medal. And it was a really kind of landmark [00:09:00] event, you know, she was a woman, women had no access to higher education at the time.
And it was also a triumph for American astronomy. And that's what paved the way for her being hired by the U S government.
Dean Regas: It's such an amazing thing to think about this for, you know, 175 years ago, that the, the lines of communication and this You know, this new age of science in the United States and man, it makes me feel good that the right thing. It's, I don't know, it seems like it's almost too good to be true.
Maria Popova: Well, I mean, one thing I do love about science is that the people who end up doing science with their life really do care about the truth, right?
So there is a kind of underlying moral value system beneath that. And the truth was that she made the discovery. First and I think it was natural for scientists to say we have to honor that because that's just reality.
Dean Regas: Well, so all this [00:10:00] happened 1847 she discovers his comet. How old was she at that point?
Maria Popova: She was 29
Dean Regas: So that was her breakthrough basically had she already started doing computing and other things before that?
Maria Popova: Computing was just a job she had for the government leader But she had fallen in love with astronomy when she was 11 years old and she observed an annular solar eclipse And that was it.
She was just sold for life.
Her father had converted a former closet into a little study for the ten Quaker children to share. But she ended up being the only person in it, studying math, studying astronomy. There was a little note card that she would hang on the door that said, Miss Mitchell is busy. Do not knock. She'd been doing astronomy and thinking about astronomy for 18 years.
Before she discovered the comet, so she sounds like she was young, but she got a very early
start.
Dean Regas: So let's [00:11:00] fast forward here a little bit in her life to where you describe in your writings, these dome parties where Maria and other astronomers, they gathered to play this game of this writing game about astronomy and on scraps of used paper.
What, what can you tell us a little more about these gatherings, these dome parties?
Maria Popova: So she, when she started teaching at Vassar, she was given housing at the university and it was in the same building as the observatory, so she slept in a little cot in the observatory. And she used to host these, as you say, dome parties for her students.
I think she did it in part because her curriculum was so rigorous. She wanted to create something delightful for the young women to kind of take joy in science and not just this kind of Tense, you know, academic rigor, and so she invited them evenings to Render in [00:12:00] poems some of the things that had been learning or observing some of the actual science they were working with and That came very naturally to her because poetry was her great love She had been a heavy, heavy reader of poetry since she was a little girl.
She worked for many years as head librarian at the Nantucket Athenaeum, their big cultural institution, and she just read and read and read. She wrote an incredible paper about the astronomy of Milton's Paradise Lost. And she understood that poetry... Is another way of paying attention to the world just as science is and so yes She would host these dome parties and the young women would would write poems some of them Very kind of cheeky and not poetically, you know high quality, but delightful about astronomy and some of them quite good
Dean Regas: And then you learn more about her life story And and so what do you believe Maria Mitchell's story can [00:13:00] teach not only the professional astronomer Maybe even the backyard astronomer of today
Maria Popova: Well, I think the largest thing is that the, the cosmos belongs to everyone. I mean, we belong to it and there's no cultural convention to say who may or may not study it, take delight in it and make discoveries. I mean, she bypassed every form of convention of her time to have the life she had and make the discoveries she made and I think the other thing that's interesting is that people who are already in the margins of society in some way or other in some way by the parameters of their time and place have this lovely self permission to just be other in other ways as well.
So [00:14:00] she was already kind of excluded from so much that She just decided to pursue what she was passionate about because there was really no cost of failing. There was no real cost to her. She just could do it. And I find that very inspiring in general, in culture.
Dean Regas: Well, this has been wonderful talking with you today. Thanks so much, Maria. I really appreciate this. Learning a little bit more about this. Amazing astronomer and and the work you're doing too. It's really great.
Maria Popova: Thank you, Dean. Thank you for caring about this incredible person that we owe so much to.
Dean Regas: Now, the one thing I can tell you about comet predictions is that comets are notoriously fickle things that astronomers think we know what comets will do, but studying this in history tells me we have no idea.[00:15:00]
A comet could be said to be bright and then it just fades away. It doesn't happen or never brightens up. And then others that you wouldn't expect to be bright suddenly brighten. I can give you a consolation prize. We have these things called meteor showers that happen every year. There's some famous ones, like in August we have what's called the Perseid meteor shower.
Usually around August 12th and 13th, that's when it usually peaks. But the next big meteor shower that's coming up is called the Orionids. And that's going to be on October 21st. Now you can see these these meteors. These are like the shooting stars, your classic things that you see these lights shooting across the sky.
Those are your meteors burning up in the atmosphere. And the Orionids in October are leftover pieces of a comet. Comet goes by, leaves the tail behind, leaves material tail, and then the Earth runs into that tail material. And we can predict it every single year. It runs into this material. That's why we can have this every single year.
And the [00:16:00] meteors seem to radiate out of the constellation Orion. So that's why they call it the Orionids. But, where does the Orionids come from? Well, it comes from Halley's Comet. So you might not be able to see Halley's Comet again until, what is it, oh, 2061, but you can see pieces of Halley's Comet every October in the Orion and Meteor Shower.
For me, good excuse to go out and stargaze and do some counting of shooting stars.
Looking Up with Dean Regas is a production of Cincinnati Public Radio. Ella Rowen is our show producer, audio engineer, and comet connoisseur. Oh man, and she also writes the copy for this, so she made me say comet connoisseur back to back. Hey, I did it twice. Our theme song is Possible Light by Ziv Moran.
You can find full transcripts of every episode of Looking Up on our website. Just tap the link in our show notes. I'm Dean Regas, [00:17:00] and keep looking up.
