On eBay Now...RARE “Archaeoastronomy Pioneer” Maud Makemson Hand Signed TLS From 1964 For Sale
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RARE “Archaeoastronomy Pioneer” Maud Makemson Hand Signed TLS From 1964:
$199.99
Up for sale "Archaeoastronomy" Maud Makemson Hand Signed TLS Dated 1964.
ES-4878
Maud
Worcester Makemson (September
16, 1891—December 25, 1977) was an American astronomer, a specialist on archaeoastronomy, and director of Vassar Observatory. Maud
Lavon Worcester was born in 1891 in Center Harbor, New
Hampshire. She attended Girls' Latin School in Boston. She briefly
attended Radcliffe College, but
left to teach school. In 1911, her family moved to Pasadena, California. She
was working as a journalist in Bisbee, Arizona when she took an interest in astronomy.
She returned to California and taught school while taking correspondence
courses and summer classes to qualify for admission to the University of
California. She earned a bachelor's degree from UCLA in
1925, followed by a PhD from University
of California at Berkeley in 1930. Her doctoral work involved calculating the
orbits of asteroids. Maud Worcester Makemson joined
the Vassar College faculty
as an assistant astronomy professor in 1932; she became a full professor in
1944. In 1936, she succeeded Caroline Furness as director of the Vassar Observatory. She
received a Guggenheim
Fellowship in 1941 to study Maya astronomy, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Japan and India in 1953-1954.
Makemson's interest in non-Western astronomical knowledge resulted in several
monographs, The Morning Star Rises: An Account of Polynesian Astronomy (1941),
The Astronomical Tables of the Maya (1943), The Maya Correlation Problem (1946), and The Book of the Jaguar Priest (1951,
a translation of a sixteenth-century text). Makemson
retired from Vassar in 1957, then taught astronomy at UCLA. She co-authored a
textbook, Introduction to Astrodynamics (1960) with Robert M. L. Baker, Jr. In
the 1960s, she joined the Applied Research Laboratories of General Dynamics, to consult with NASA on lunar exploration.
She worked on the problem of selenography, developing a way for astronauts standing on the
moon to locate themselves precisely. Among her undergraduate students at Vassar
was astronomer Vera Rubin, to whom she
gave a celestial globe.