Annie S. D. Maunder

Annie Scott Dill Maunder (née Russell; 14 April 1868 – 15 September 1947) was an Irish-British astronomer, who recorded the first evidence of the movement of the sunspot emergence from the poles toward the equator over the 11-year solar cycle, finding the now-called Maunder Minimum. As sole author, she also devised with her husband, Edward Walter Maunder, the butterfly diagram for sunspots. Alone, she discovered that the sunspots in the Sun were asymmetrical. She was one of the leading astronomers of her time, but because of her gender, her contribution was often underplayed at the time. In 1916, she was elected to the Royal Astronomical Society, 21 years after being refused membership because of her gender.