Baptized Danzig, (Gdańsk, Poland), 17 January 1647
Buried Danzig, (Gdańsk, Poland), 23 December 1693
Catherina Hevelius assisted her husband, Danzig brewer and politician Johannes Hevel, with his astronomical observations, data reduction, and atlas engraving, and published their important work after his death. The daughter of a wealthy Dutch merchant, Nicholas Koopman, and his wife Joanna (née Mennings), Catherina Elisabetha was well educated for a young woman of her time. In the course of acquiring that education, she apparently developed a strong interest in astronomy before the age of 16 years and may have visited the Hevelius household and observatory. Hevelius's first wife, Katharina (née Rebeschke), also the daughter of a wealthy Danzig citizen, had managed her husband's household and helped with the brewery business to provide him time for civic involvement and astronomy, but she was not interested in astronomy. Katharina died in 1662.
After her marriage to Johannes in 1663,...
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Selected References
MacPike, Eugene Fairfield (1937). Hevelius, Flamsteed and Halley: Three Contemporary Astronomers and Their Mutual Relations. London: Taylor and Francis.
North, John D. (1972). “Hevelius, Johannes.” In Dictionary of Scientific Biography, edited by Charles Coulston Gillispie. Vol. 6, pp. 360–364. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Rizzo, P. V. (1954). “Early Daughters of Urania. ” Sky & Telescope 14, no. 1: 7–9.
Schiebinger, Londa (1999). “Maria Winkelmann at the Berlin Academy: A Turning Point for Women in Science. ” In History of Women in the Sciences, edited by Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, pp. 39–65, esp. 59–60. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Williams, T.R. (2007). Hevelius, Catherina Elisabetha Koopman. In: Hockey, T., et al. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_619
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