Born in Germany in an era when no woman could obtain a formal education in science anywhere in the world, Maria Clara Eimmart (May 27, 1676–October 29, 1707) predated Caroline Herschel — the world’s first professional woman astronomer — by a century. She went on to become an artist, engraver, and astronomer who produced some of the most striking astronomical art since the invention of the telescope, in a time when humanity had no idea that the universe contained galaxies other than our own.

Like Margaret Fuller, Eimmart benefitted from the love and intellectual generosity of a father who equipped her with a rigorous foundation of French, Latin, mathematics, and art. A successful engraver, draughtsman, and painter with a passion for astronomy, he spent most of his earnings on astronomical instruments and eventually built a small observatory on the city walls of Nuremberg, where he served as director of the Academy of Art. The young Maria Clara began apprenticing with her father both as an artist and an astronomer, assisting in his observations and creating pictorial depictions of his data.

Between her late teens and her mid-twenties — around the time her compatriot Maria Sibylla Merian was revolutionizing entomology with her own work as a self-taught artist and naturalist — Eimmart created a series of exquisite, detailed illustrations of celestial objects. Among them are the phases of Venus, Galileo’s observations of which furnished the first nail in the coffin of the geocentric model of the universe less than a century earlier.

In her thirtieth year — an old maid by the era’s standards — she married one of his father’s pupils, a budding physicist who would eventually come to direct the observatory. A year later, at only thirty-one, Eimmart died in childbirth — a common tragedy at the time — leaving behind some stunning astronomical engravings of the Moon, the planets of the Solar System, comets, and the atmospheric optical phenomena paraselene and parhelion, Latin for “beside the Moon” and “beside the Sun,” commonly known as moon dog and sun dog.

Some of Eimmart’s art appears in Michael Benson’s altogether splendid Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time. Complement it with Johannes Hevelius’s pioneering 17th-century map of the moon and the Solar System quilt that a 19th-century Iowa woman spent seven years embroidering in order to use it as a teaching tool in her astronomy lectures to women, then revisit contemporary artist Lia Halloran’s stunning cyanotype tribute to trailblazing women in astronomy.

I have made some of Eimmart’s etchings, which are in the public domain, available as art prints, with all proceeds benefitting the endeavor to build New York City’s first-ever public observatory at Pioneer Works: