Her maternal uncle was the respected Harvard astronomer, Henry Draper. Historian and physicist, John William Draper, was her maternal grandfather. Her father's ancestors were French Huguenots, while her mother was descended from Portuguese nobility.
Maury was educated at home with her brother and younger sister until her teenage years. Her father, an Episcopalian minister, was her primary tutor. She went on to study at Vassar and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1887, earning honors in astronomy and physics.
The Henry Draper Project
When Henry Draper died, astronomer Edward Charles Pickering of the Harvard Observatory took over his project of cataloging and classifying stars according to their spectra. The light from a star, when viewed through a prism and magnified appears as a band of colors punctuated by darker bands. These are termed spectral lines, and represent a distinctive fingerprint for each star. Analysis of these lines provides insights into the star's temperature, chemical composition, and motion.
A year after her graduation, Maury joined Pickering's staff of women "computers" to help complete the immense work of observing and classifying stars for the Draper catalog.
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