Maria Margaretha Kirch
German astronomer (1670-1720)
Maria Margaretha Kirch (née Winckelmann, in historic sources named Maria Margaretha Kirchin; 25 February 1670 – 29 December 1720) was a German astronomer. She was one of the first famous astronomers of her period due to her writing on the conjunction of the sun with Saturn, Venus, and Jupiter in 1709 and 1712 respectively.
Early life
Maria was educated from an early age by her father, a Lutheran minister, who believed that she deserved an education equivalent to that given to young boys. By the age of 13 she had lost both her father and mother. By that time, she had also received a general education from her brother-in-law Justinus Toellner and the well-known self taught astronomer Christoph Arnold, who lived nearby in the town of Sommerfeld and was credited with being the first to discover a passing comet. She became Arnold's unofficial apprentice and later his assistant, living with him and his family. Astronomy was not organized entirely along guild lines during this time period. As a result, the journey to become an astronomer often looked very different on a case by case basis.
Through Arnold, Maria met the famous German astronomer and mathematician Gottfried Kirch, who was 30 years her senior and had received training in astronomy by Johannes Hevelius and a formal education at the University of Jena. They married in 1692, later having four children, all of whom followed their parents by studying astronomy.
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This entry incorporates text from “Maria Margaretha Kirch” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.