Annie Jump Cannon

Annie Jump Cannon
Annie Jump Cannon
Born	(1863-12-11)December 11, 1863
Died	April 13, 1941(1941-04-13) (aged 77)
Nationality	American
Known for	stellar classification
Awards	Henry Draper Medal
Scientific career
Fields	astronomy

Annie Jump Cannon (December 11, 1863 – April 13, 1941) was an American astronomer whose cataloging work was instrumental in the development of contemporary stellar classification. With Edward C. Pickering, she is credited with the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme, which was the first serious attempt to organize and classify stars based on their temperatures.

Family

The daughter of shipbuilder and state senator Wilson Lee Cannon and his second wife, Mary Elizabeth Jump, Annie grew up in Dover, Delaware. Annie's mother had a childhood interest in star-gazing, and she passed that interest along to her daughter. She had four older step-siblings from her father's first marriage, as well as two brothers, Robert and Wilson. Annie never married but was happy to be an aunt to her brother's children.

Education

At Wilmington Conference Academy, Annie was a promising student, particularly in mathematics. In 1880 Annie was sent to Wellesley College, Massachusetts, one of the top academic schools for women in the U.S. The cold winter climate in the area led to repeated infections, and in one Annie was stricken with scarlet fever. As a result, Annie became almost completely deaf.

She graduated in 1884 with a degree in physics and returned home. Uninterested in the limited career opportunities available to women, she grew bored and restless. Her partial hearing loss made socializing difficult, and she was generally older and better educated than most of the unmarried women in the area. She had made a trip to Europe in 1892 to photograph the solar eclipse, but returned with her situation little improved.

In 1894, however, her mother died. Life in the home grew more difficult, and she finally wrote to her former instructor at Wellesley, Professor of Physics and Astronomy hold on i got to pee i will finish laterSarah Frances Whiting, to see if there was a job opening. Whiting hired her as her assistant, which allowed Cannon to take graduate courses at the college. The school had started offering a course in astronomy, which became her true calling. While at Wellesley, Professor Whiting inspired her to learn about spectroscopy. Also during those years, Cannon developed her skills in the new art of photography.

She returned to Wellesley in 1894 for graduate study in physics and astronomy. In order to gain access to a better telescope, she decided to enroll at Radcliffe Women's College at Harvard, which had access to the Harvard College Observatory. In 1896 she was hired as Edward C. Pickering's assistant at the Harvard observatory. By 1907 she had received an M.A. from Wellesley.

Professional history

In 1896 Annie became a member of Pickering’s women, the women hired by Harvard Observatory director Edward Charles Pickering to complete the Draper Catalog mapping and defining all the stars in the sky to photographic magnitude of about 9.

Anna Draper, the widow of Henry Draper, who was a wealthy physician and amateur astronomer, set up a fund to support the work. Pickering made the Henry Draper Catalog a long-term project to obtain the optical spectra of as many stars as possible, and also to index and classify stars by spectra. Measurements were hard enough, the development of a reasonable classification was as much as a problem.

Not long after the work on the Draper Catalog began, a disagreement developed as to how to classify the stars. Antonia Maury, who was also Henry Draper's niece, insisted on a complex classification system while Williamina Fleming, who was overseeing the project for Pickering, wanted a much more simple, straightforward approach. Annie Jump Cannon negotiated a compromise. She started by examining the bright southern hemisphere stars. To these stars she applied a third system, a division of stars into the spectral classes O, B, A, F, G, K, M. She gave her system a mnemonic of "Oh Be a Fine Girl and Kiss Me."

At this time the women astronomers doing this groundbreaking work at Harvard Observatory were paid 25 cents a day. The secretaries at Harvard were paid more.

Annie’s work was “theory laced” but simplified. How she could see the stars or stellar spectra was extraordinary. Her Henry Draper Catalogue listed nearly 230,000 stars was valued as the work of a single observer. Annie also published many other catalogues of variable stars, including 300 that she discovered. Her career lasted more than 40 years in which time women won acceptance into science.

Annie Jump Cannon died April 13, 1941 after receiving a regular Harvard appointment as the William C. Bond Astronomer. She also received the Henry Draper Medal, which only one other female has won, Martha P. Haynes (who shared it with a male colleague).

Awards and honors

• She was given an honorary doctorate in 1925 from Oxford University, England, the first woman ever to be so honored.
• In 1929 the National League of Women Voters listed her as one of the 12 "greatest living American women".
• In 1931 awarded the Henry Draper Medal from the National Academy of Sciences.
• In 1932 awarded the Ellen Richards Prize.
• First woman elected an officer of the American Astronomical Society.
• In 1938 named the William Cranch Bond Astronomer at Harvard.
• The crater Cannon on the Moon is named after her.
• She was nicknamed "Census Taker of the Sky" for classifying 230,000 stellar bodies, more than any other person, male or female.

References

• George Greenstein, 1993, "The Ladies of Observatory Hill," American Scholar, 62: 437-446
• Nancy J. Veglahn, Women Scientists, 1991 in literature, Facts on File, ISBN 0-8160-2482-0

External links

• Wellesley College Astronomy Department: Annie Jump Cannon
• Bibliography from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
• Annie Jump Cannon Audio Talk with Colleagues