Maria Mitchell was born on Nantucket Island, off the coast of New England, in 1818. The dark sky arching above her island home highlighted the brilliance of the stars, captivating Maria. Maria spent many an evening on the rooftop in the company of her father, who introduced her to a telescope that allowed her to “sweep the sky.” Maria learned to identify stars and planets and phenomena such as eclipses and the Milky Way. She also assisted her father in helping ship captains and sailors, who visited their home, to calibrate the instruments that helped them determine their locations on the ocean—using the stars, of course! Maria became a teacher and then a librarian, and she put her curiosity to the study of mathematics and celestial navigation. On October 1, 1847, Maria saw something very special from the rooftop—“a nameless patch of light, bright and blurry”—that she knew must be a comet. Her father exhorted her to post a letter right away to astronomers at Harvard College—a letter that then went to England and Denmark. Maria’s letter passed through the hands of astronomers a world away. All agreed that Maria had spotted the comet first, thus it could be named after her: Miss Mitchell’s Comet. Author Hayley Barrett’s picture book biography What Miss Mitchell Saw is a wonderfully simple and expressive introduction to a person well worth knowing about; readers will feel they have made Maria’s journey alongside her. Illustrator Diana Sudyka captures that journey in equally expressive paintings flowing through the pages. An afterword titled “A Bit More about Maria Mitchell—Astronomer, Educator, Activist” highlights other “firsts” in Mitchell’s life, encouraging young readers to watch, wonder and explore. Ages 4-8. Beach Lane Books / Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing, 2019.
Readers can learn more about Maria Mitchell at the website of the Maria Mitchell Association.
Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth, by Oliver Jeffers, is a delightful and insightful book that helps place in context such discoveries as Maria Mitchell’s. Jeffers welcomes young readers (and older ones too) to planet Earth – its landscape, its atmosphere, its humans and animals, its countryside and cities -- with everything moving at its own pace, with each of us just one small element in a much larger picture. He encourages us to consider how we will use our time here, connected as we are to the whole. Ages 4 and up. Philomel Books, 2017.
