The Science of the Stars (Edition2024)

Edward Walter Maunder was an English astronomer who lived from 12 April 1851 to 21 March 1928. His research into sunspots and the solar magnetic cycle led to the discovery of the Maunder Minimum, which lasted from 1645 to 1715. Maunder was born in London in 1851, the youngest child of a Wesleyan Society minister. He studied at King's College London but did not graduate. To fund his studies, he obtained a job in a London bank. Maunder returned to the Royal Observatory in 1873 as a spectroscopic assistant. He married Edith Hannah Bustin in 1875, and they had six children: four sons (one died in infancy) and two girls. Following Edith's death in 1888, he met Annie Scott Dill Russell (later Annie Russell Maunder, 1868-1947), a mathematician and astronomer trained at Cambridge's Girton College, with whom he cooperated for the rest of his life, in 1890. From 1890 through 1895, she worked as a "lady computer" at the Observatory. Maunder and Russell married in 1895. Annie Maunder became one of the Royal Astronomical Society's first female members in 1916.