“To a utilitarian age astronomy seems a somewhat worn-out, useless science.” So declared American astronomer Harold Jacoby in 1911, after more than a decade of marked decline in astronomy teaching in American schools. Prior to about 1900, astronomy was considered one of the most important subjects in American curricula, a lynchpin of mental discipline pedagogy, which held that what was taught in schools was important not for itself but for what it trained the mind to do. So seductive was astronomy as a subject for training the mind that Catherine Beecher recommended it for the idealized girls’ academies she described in her influential 1841 tract, A Treatise on Domestic Economy. By the early twentieth century, however, mental discipline pedagogy had paled before a perceived need for children to learn “content” in American schools, even as professional American astronomers became among the best in the world. In Ottoman Lebanon, however, astronomy education took a different course. Eliza Everett, American Protestant missionary and headmistress of the Beirut Female Seminary, published an Arabic-language astronomy textbook for girls, Principles of the Study of Heavenly Bodies, in 1875 which remained in use at least until 1903. By the 1920s, American girls’ schools in Lebanon would become increasingly focused on training women for childrearing and domestic work—perhaps reflecting a transnational move towards Jacoby’s “utilitarian age.” Before the first World War, by contrast, women like Eliza Everett were clearly out to teach Lebanese girls a host of other things. This paper reads Everett’s textbook in light of transnational changes in girls’ education and the politicized trajectories of astronomical knowledge in the Ottoman Empire to ask what kind of educational vision had girls learning astronomy in Ottoman Lebanon, and what unexpected outcomes this vision might have produced given ongoing debates about knowledge, science, and faith in the Ottoman world. It argues that nineteenth-century girls’ education in Lebanon was not a mere precursor to the now-familiar projects of forging “mothers of the future” or of the nation. Rather, it was a wild west in which demands, desires, and pedagogical approaches circulated across empires and oceans, making it important that Lebanese girls learn about the stars. In the end, these competing epistemologies and pedagogies opened up unexpected professional and intellectual arenas for girls in Lebanon as in the United States.