On the night of October 1, 1847, Maria Mitchell swept her telescope across the sky above Nantucket and detected a telescopic comet that had escaped the notice of observers elsewhere. The body she identified would later be designated "Miss Mitchell's Comet," and the following year King Christian VIII of Denmark presented her with a gold medal prize in recognition of the discovery.

Mitchell was born on August 1, 1818, in Nantucket, and went on to work as an astronomer, naturalist, librarian, and writer. She became the first internationally known woman to work as a professional astronomer, a distinction that accompanied her emergence as a figure of considerable standing in the American scientific community. She was elected the first woman Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and, separately, the first woman elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Both elections marked formal acknowledgment of her place within institutions that had previously admitted no women to such standing.

In 1865 Mitchell accepted a position at Vassar College, where she served as a university teacher and became the first internationally known woman to hold a professorship in astronomy. Her work at Vassar placed her in a role where she taught students the discipline to which she had devoted her career, and she continued in that capacity for a substantial portion of her later professional life. Throughout her career she worked in English and remained a citizen of the United States.

Mitchell died on June 29, 1889, in Lynn. Her election as the first woman Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences remains a documented marker of the barriers she crossed within organized scientific life in the nineteenth century, and the comet she identified in 1847 continues to bear her name in the historical record of astronomical discovery.