RARE “Archaeoastronomy Pioneer” Maud Makemson Hand Signed TLS Dated 1964 For Sale

When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.

---

RARE “Archaeoastronomy Pioneer” Maud Makemson Hand Signed TLS Dated 1964:
$139.99

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. 

RARE “Archaeoastronomy Pioneer” Maud Makemson Hand Signed TLS Dated 1964

$139.99