Maria Margaretha Kirch

German Astronomer Maria Kirch (1670 - 1720)

Maria Margaretha Kirch (née Winckelmann) was born in February 1670 near Leipzig, Germany. Maria was educated by her father, a Lutheran minister, who wanted to give her an equal education as was provided to young boys at the time. She lost both her parents by the time she was 13; by this time, she had received a general education by her brother-in-law and by a well-known local astronomer named Christoph Arnold. Her uncle continued her education, and she began studying astronomy with Arnold, later becoming his apprentice and assistant.

It was through Arnold where Maria met Gottfried Kirch, the famous German astronomer and mathematician. They married in 1692 and had four children who would all go on to study astronomy like their parents. Even though women were not allowed into universities in Germany at the time, Maria was able to become one of the few women active in astronomy in the 1700s because much of the work in astronomy took place outside a university, and her husband was an enthusiastic teacher.

Together with his three sisters, Gottfried had been developing calendars which included important astronomical information such as the phases of the Moon, times of sunrises and sunsets, and the positions of the planets. Maria later joined in this calendar producing pursuit. During the first decade of her work at the Berlin Academy of Sciences as her husband's assistant, Maria observed and recorded the night sky. On one of these observing nights, in April 1702, Maria discovered a comet (later called C/1702 H1).

After her husband died in 1710, Maria trained her son Christfried and daughters Christine and Margaretha to act as her assistants in the family's astronomical endeavors, continuing to produce calendars and almanacs.