American born Antonia Maury came from a family with a
distinguished scientific background. She was a cousin of Matthew
Maury, the oceanographer, a niece of Henry Draper, the physician
and astronomer after whom the Harvard star catalogue was named,
her sister became a paleontologist, while her father, a
clergyman, was also a well-known naturalist. Maury was educated
at Vassar and graduated in 1887; two years later she became an
assistant to Edward Pickering at Harvard College Observatory, as
well as lecturing at various eastern colleges between 1899 and
1908. Her first assignment for Pickering was to determine the
orbital period of the spectroscopic binary Zeta Ursae Majoris,
also called Mizar, which was first discovered by Pickering in
1887. Maury independently discovered the second binary, Beta
Aurigae and determined its orbital period. Maury also did a lot
of work on spectra, and around the same time that Cannon was
revising the system of spectral classification of stars, Maury
proposed an additional modifi