Annie Jump Cannon, American Astronomer

Cannon examining a photographic plate of stars. Annie Jump Cannon (December 11, 1863 - April 13, 1941) was an American astronomer. In 1880 Cannon was sent to Wellesley College in Massachusetts, during which time she was stricken with scarlet fever and became almost completely deaf. She graduated with a degree in physics in 1884. In 1896 Cannon 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. The female astronomers doing this groundbreaking work at Harvard Observatory earned 25 cents per hour, which was less than what the secretaries at the university earned. Cannon's observation of stars and stellar spectra was extraordinary. Her Henry Draper Catalogue listed nearly 230, 000 stars, all the work of a single observer. Cannon also published other catalogues of variable stars, including 300 that she discovered. 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. Her career lasted more than 40 years, during which time women gained acceptance within the scientific community. She died in 1941 at the age of 77

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Astronomer Catalog Classification Draper Harvard Observatory Pickering Scheme Staes Stellar

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