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Edward Walter Maunder (12 April 1851 – 21 March 1928) was an English astronomer best remembered for his study of sunspots and the solar magnetic cycle that led to his identification of the period from 1645 to 1715 that is now known as the Maunder Minimum.
Maunder was born in London, the youngest child of a minister of the Wesleyan Society. He attended King's College London but never graduated. He took a job in a London bank to finance his studies.
In 1873 Maunder returned to the Royal Observatory, taking a position as a spectroscopic assistant. Shortly after, in 1875, he married Edith Hannah Bustin, who gave birth to six children, 3 sons, 2 daughters and a son who died in infancy.
Following the death of Edith in 1888, he met Annie Scott Dill Russell (1868–1947) in 1890, a mathematician and astronomer educated at Girton College in Cambridge, with whom he collaborated for the remainder of his life. In 1895 Maunder and Russell married. In 1916 Annie Maunder became one of the first women accepted by the Royal Astronomical Society in England.
Part of Maunder's job at the Observatory involved photographing and measuring sunspots, and in doing so he observed that the solar latitudes at which sunspots occur varies in a regular way over the course of the 11 year cycle.
After studying the work of Gustav Spörer, who examined old records from the different observatories archives looking for changes of the heliographic latitude of sunspots, Maunder announced Spörer's conclusions in his own paper edited in 1894.
The period, recognised earlier by Spörer, now bears Maunder's name. Annie worked as a "lady computer" at the Observatory from 1890 to 1895. In 1904, they published their results in the form of the famous "butterfly" diagram that shows this regular variation.
The Maunders travelled extensively for observations going to places such as the West Indies, Lapland, India, Algiers, Mauritius. Their last eclipse expedition was to Labrador for the Solar eclipse of August 30, 1905 at the invitation of the Canadian government.
The expedition was unsuccessful due to overcast conditions.
In 1882 Maunder (and some other European astronomers) observed what he called an "auroral beam"; as yet unexplained, it had some similarity in appearance to either a noctilucent cloud or an upper tangent arc.
However, Maunder wrote that the phenomenon moved rapidly from horizon to horizon, which would rule out a noctilucent cloud or upper tangent arc.
Further, upper tangent arc cannot occur during nighttime when the observation was made. Since he made his observation during highly intense auroral activity, he assumed it was some extraordinary auroral phenomenon, though one he had never observed again before or after.
In 1890, Maunder was a driving force in the foundation of the British Astronomical Association.
Although he had been fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society since 1875, Maunder wanted an association of astronomers open to every person interested in astronomy, from every class of society, and especially open for women.
Maunder was the first editor of the Journal of the BAA, an office later taken by his wife Annie.
His older brother, Thomas Frid Maunder (1841–1935), was a co-founder and secretary of the Association for 38 years.
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