Women Scientists

Annie Jump Cannon 1863-1941

At a glance:

US astronomer - and Fine Girl - who catalogued the stars

As a child growing up in Delaware, Annie Cannon contracted scarlet fever. It left her almost completely deaf. She obtained a degree in physics but there was little for women could do thereafter and she became bored. After the death of her mother and by now 30, she wrote to her former tutor at Wellesley College in the hope of a job. She worked there as a junior physics teacher, gaining skills in spectroscopic measurements. In 1894 she was hired by the director of the Harvard Observatory, Edward Pickering to complete the Draper Catalogue, which mapped all the stars in the sky, classifying them by their spectra. It was a project fraught with problems as how to classify stars proved very difficult. Annie Jump Cannon devised a system still used today. Oh Be a Fine Girl and Kiss Me was the mnemonic she devised for spectral classes O, B, A, F, G, K. Her Draper catalogues were immensely valued and she discovered over 300 stars herself. But it wasn't until 1938, two years before retirements that she was able to obtain a regular Harvard appointment as William C Bond Astronomer.
Annie Jump Cannon

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