Margaretta Palmer

Margaretta Palmer, Vassar College Class of 1887.
Credit: Vassar College

Margaretta Palmer was born in 1862 in Branford, Connecticut. She enrolled in Vassar College and became one of Maria Mitchell's astronomy students in the fall term of 1885. Under Mitchell, Palmer studied computational astronomy, or astrometry. At her commencement in 1887, Palmer and one of her fellow astronomers, Antonia Maury, were among the seven graduates who delivered addresses. She spent the year after her graduation as Mitchell's assistant in the Vassar College Observatory. She also served as an instructor of Latin at Vassar College.

Following the Harvard Observatory's practice of hiring women, the observatory at Yale University hired Palmer in 1889 as an assistant. A few years later, in 1892, Palmer became part of the first group of women admitted into the Yale Graduate School. Then, in 1894, she was among the first seven students (and the first female astronomer) to earn a Ph.D. from Yale. Her doctoral thesis was called Determination of the Orbit of the Comet 1847VI and was a recalculation of the orbit of Comet 1847VI, the comet Mitchell had discovered in October 1847. Palmer later computed the orbits of three of eight comets discovered by the German-born English astronomer, Caroline Herschel. She also analyzed the motions of Jupiter's satellites which proved to be a monumental task (the computations involved 1128 equations of condition in 13 unknowns). Palmer was unable to complete this colossal computing job in her lifetime, but others would eventually fulfill this particular mission.

In addition to working with comets and Jupiter's satellites, Palmer focused her efforts on indexing and cataloging the positions of hundreds of thousands of stars. She published her work in a 1917 Astronomical Journal article entitled "The Yale Index to Star Catalogues." This star catalogue, along with a few others, remained central to stellar astronomy for decades into the twentieth century.