Maria Cunitz

Maria Cunitz was a Silesian astronomer, regarded as the most notable woman astronomer of the early modern era. Her birth year is uncertain: older writers gave 1604, a congratulatory anthology for her first wedding points to 1610, and the MacTutor biography splits the difference at about 1607. She grew up in Schweidnitz, now Świdnica in Poland, and married the lawyer David von Gerstmann in 1623 and, after his death, the physician Elias von Loewen in 1630, who encouraged her astronomy. During the Thirty Years War the couple took refuge in a Cistercian convent at Olobok, where she reworked the Rudolphine Tables of Johannes Kepler. In 1650 she published Urania propitia in German and Latin, with new tables, new ephemerides and a simpler solution of Kepler second law for finding a planet on its elliptical path. The Cunitz crater on Venus and the minor planet 12624 Mariacunitia are named for her.