Annie Scott Dill Maunder (née Russell) FRAS (14 April 1868 – 15 September 1947) was an Irish-British astronomer, who recorded the first evidence of the movement of sunspot emergence from the poles toward the equator over the Sun's 11-year cycle.

[5][10] Annie and her sister Hester pursued secondary education at the Ladies Collegiate School in Belfast, which later became Victoria College.

He praised her for ability to "throw herself into her work with such success, in spite of being more than ordinarily handicapped, even for a woman, with insufficiency of preliminary training".

[4][10][12] Annie was described as having an active mind and a "lively imagination combined with a tireless zeal in seeking evidence and working out details before presenting any conclusions.

Annie's father submitted a request for her to obtain the job, and a powerful promoter, Sir Robert Ball, wrote her a letter of recommendation.

[4][6][10][11] For a year, Annie worked as a mathematics mistress at the Ladies' High School on the island of Jersey until she was offered the position by the Chief Assistant, Herbert Hall Turner.

[4][6][10] In 1891, Annie began her work at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, serving as one of the "lady computers" assigned to the solar department.

[4][6][9][10] This included the giant sunspot of July 1892 which was caused by a magnetic storm resulting in the largest spot ever record at Greenwich at the time.

[10] The Irish science writer Agnes Clerke observed, "Mrs. Maunder with her tiny lens has beaten all the big instruments.

"[4][10] Annie's description of the direction and motion of the particles in the corona which she observed, describes the now accepted Parker Spiral structure of the solar wind.

[9] In 1943 Sydney Chapman, President of the Royal Society used the butterfly diagram as the subject of his 1943 presidential address, an honour for something she considered as her "most cherished pieces of work".

[10][11] Annie gave the butterfly diagram to Walter Orr Roberts (the director of the High Altitude Observatory) during the Second World War.

)[4][9] The book was written for the amateur readers, containing her photographs of the sun and the Milky Way, in hopes to draw in more people to the field of astronomy.

[6][9] The book discusses the sudden terrestrial magnetic storms coinciding with the sunspots' rotation period which was seen in the 1898 eclipse in India.

[4][9] The Maunders thought that the magnetic storms were made of positively and negatively charged electrified particles, an "insight [that] far predates better-known statements on the same matter, and has much in common with our present-day understanding".

Although Walter had been fellow of the RAS since 1875, he wanted an association of people from every class of society who were interested in astronomy, especially open for women.

[4][11][16] One Fellow specifically implied that the women would largely serve as a distraction and simply a social element to the meetings without contributing much of worth.

[16] Annie did not take lightly to the prejudice against her and other women throughout her field occupied largely by men, and she especially did not agree with the results of the 1892 RAS election.

[9][12] In 2016 the RAS established the Annie Maunder medal for an outstanding contribution to outreach and public engagement in astronomy or geophysics.

In March 2022 English Heritage unveiled a blue plaque to Annie and Walter Maunder at their former home in Brockley, south London.