Annie S. D. Maunder

In January 1890, Annie was told about a position at Greenwich that was available by her good friend Alice Everett.[6][10] In response, Annie wrote many times to the Royal Observatory hoping to be considered for the position. Annie's father submitted a request for her to obtain the job, and a powerful promoter, Sir Robert Ball, wrote her a letter of recommendation.[4][6][10][11] For a year, Annie worked as a mathematics mistress at the Ladies’ High School on the island of Jersey until she was offered the position by the Chief Assistant, Herbert Hall Turner.[4][6][10] In 1891, Annie began her work at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, serving as one of the "lady computers" assigned to the solar department.[2][3][4][6][8][9][12][11] This was a special department set up in 1873 to photograph the sun.[6][12] Annie was offered £4 a month which she regarded as being barely enough to live on, as a teacher she had made £8 a year and was provided housing.[4][6][8][10]

Annie worked under Walter Maunder on the Greenwich photoheliograph program.[2][3][4][10][12] Her duties included using the Dallmeyer photo-heliograph to capture pictures of sunspots, find their location, and determine their properties.[9][10] There, Annie assisted Walter Maunder, and she spent a great deal of time photographing the sun.[4][8][9][10][12][11] She also tracked the movements of a great number of sunspots caused by the solar maximum of 1894.[4][6][9][10] This included the giant sunspot of July 1892 which was caused by a magnetic storm resulting in the largest spot ever record at Greenwich at the time.[4][10] In her first year at Greenwich (1891), the number of recorded observations in the solar department exceeded 7 times the average number of recordings for the past 35 years.[10] While she was not credited for this, Walter Maunder nominated her for the Fellowship of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1892.[4][8][9][10][12] In November 1894, she was made editor of the Journal of the British Astronomical Association (BAA) by her husband who was president at the time. She kept this position for 35 years.[3][4][8][9][10]

Annie and Walter were married in 1895, and Annie was required to resign from her job due to restrictions on married women working in public service.[4][8][9][10][11] It is believed that "the lady computer scheme began as an experiment, was destined to have a time limit and was not repeated".[10] Forty years passed before another woman astronomer was hired alongside men at the Royal Observatory.[10] However, the two continued to collaborate, and Annie accompanied Walter on solar eclipse expeditions.[3][8][9][11] Walter was in charge of financing and organizing expeditions through the National Eclipse Committee of the Royal Observatory of Greenwich. Annie took part in five eclipse expeditions with the BAA, her first in 1896 in Norway.[8][9] For the Maunders expedition to India in 1898, Walter was not an designated member of the expedition, so he and Annie went on their own.[10]

Annie Maunder and her two cameras, at work in Algiers in 1900.

In 1897, Annie received a grant from Girton College to acquire a short-focus camera with a 1.5-inch lens which she took on expeditions.[4][6][8][10] The lens used was made by T.R. Dallmeyer, a famous London optician.[10] She used this camera to photograph the outer solar corona from India in 1898.[2][3][4][8][10][11] With this camera she captured the longest ray, coronal streamer, seen at the time with her own equipment that she operated and designed herself.[2][3][4][6][8][9][10] Her camera was designed with a large field-of-view for photographing the Milky Way, which made it possible to look for faint and distant corona.[4][6][9][10][12] To take photos of the eclipse, Annie took a series of photographs with her camera and ranging exposures during the couple minutes of the totality of the eclipse.[10] Her photographs recorded a stream from the sun that extended over 10 million kilometres.[10] The Irish science writer Agnes Clerke observed, "Mrs. Maunder with her tiny lens has beaten all the big instruments."[4][10] Annie's description of the direction and motion of the particles in the corona which she observed, describes the now accepted Parker Spiral structure of the solar wind.[9] In 1900 Annie, along with other members of the BAA, travelled to Algiers to observe the total eclipse of the sun on 28 May of that year.[4][6] The members of the association that accompanied her were Mary Acworth Evershed, Lilian Martin-Leake, and C. O. Stevens.[9][10] She photographed the corona and observed "plume" like rays, coining the term which is still used today.[4][8] In May 1901, the Maunders went on a solar expedition in Mauritius in which Annie was not included as an official observer (though her husband Walter was) and had to pay her own way.[4][6][10] Since Annie was not an official observer, she decided to go to a separate location to photograph the eclipse.[10] Of the two Mauritius corona photographs that were published, one was Walter's and one was Annie's.[10][11] The only expedition in which Annie's expenses were paid for was the expedition to Canada where the Maunders were invited and sponsored by the Canadian Government.[10][12]

In 1904, Annie and Walter created the butterfly diagram to analyse sunspots, showing the latitude of the sunspots over time.[4][9][10][11][12] The butterfly diagram "is one of the most powerful representations of the inner workings of the Sun".[9][10] The paper originally had two desiccated butterflies but a third was added after the 11 to 12-year course.[9][11] Annie was not published as coauthor on her husband's paper over the butterfly diagram.[9] In 1943 Sydney Chapman, President of the Royal Society used the butterfly diagram as the subject of his 1943 presidential address, an honour for something she considered as her "most cherished pieces of work".[10] The butterfly diagram is currently in the High Altitude Observatory.[10][11] Annie gave the butterfly diagram to Walter Orr Roberts (the director of the High Altitude Observatory) during the Second World War.[11]

Annie co-authored with her husband on some papers.[9] In 1907, she published a paper covering "an analysis of the formidable sunspot data-set that had been gathered at the ROG, covering 1889–1901"[9] as sole author.[9] This analysis contained data that took 13 years to collect, and 19 tables of results.[9] In this paper she found east–west asymmetries in sunspots, a controversial finding which she could not explain.[8][9] Years later, Arthur Schuster, a famous physicist, confirmed her findings and suggested an explanation for the asymmetry.[9] Modern science and data has also confirmed her observations on the asymmetrical nature of the sunspots.[9] Annie published The Heavens and their Story in 1908, with her husband Walter as co-author.[4][6][9][11] (She was credited by her husband as the primary author.)[4][9] The book was written for the amateur readers, containing her photographs of the sun and the Milky Way, in hopes to draw in more people to the field of astronomy.[6][9] The book discusses the sudden terrestrial magnetic storms coinciding with the sunspots' rotation period which was seen in the 1898 eclipse in India.[4][9] The Maunders thought that the magnetic storms were made of positively and negatively charged electrified particles, an "insight [that] far predates better-known statements on the same matter, and has much in common with our present-day understanding".[9]

She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) in November 1916, ten months after the bar on female Fellows was lifted.[2][4][8][9][13][14] Earlier, she had become a member of the BAA, which Walter had helped found in 1890.[12][14] Although he had been fellow of the RAS since 1875, Walter wanted an association of astronomers open to every person interested in astronomy, from every class of society, and especially open for women.[11] Annie had first been nominated for election to the RAS 24 years earlier due strongly in part to Walter's recommendation.[11][14] Along with her were two additional nominees, Elizabeth Brown and Alice Everett.[9][14] None of the three women received the three-quarters vote at the April 1892 meeting that was required for election.[4][11][14] One Fellow specifically implied that the women would largely serve as a distraction and simply a social element to the meetings without contributing much of worth.[14] Annie did not take lightly to the prejudice against her and other women throughout her field occupied largely by men, and she especially did not agree with the results of the 1892 RAS election.[4][11][14]