Annie+Jump+Cannon

=** Annie Jump Cannon **=

Annie at work graphing stars []

December 11, 1863 – April 13, 1941
“Classifying the stars has helped materially in all studies of the structure of the universe. No greater problem is presented to the human mind. Teaching man his relatively small sphere in the creation, it also encouraces him by the lessons of the unity of Nature and shows him that his power of comprehension allies him with the great intelligence over-reaching all.” --Annie Jump Cannon

Oh, Be A Fine Girl – Kiss Me! --Annie’s classification system that is still used today []

**Personal Life**
Annie Jump Cannon was born in Dover, Delaware and was the eldest of three sisters. She was the daughter of the state senator, Wilson Cannon and his second wife, Mary Jump. She first learned about the stars from her mother, who showed Annie the constellations and patterns in the stars. It was from these nights with her mother that first sparked Annie’s love of astronomy. Annie spent a few years traveling Europe and dappling in photography before she fully fell into the line of science and astronomy.

**Education**
Annie graduated from Wellesley in 1884, where she studied astronomy and physics. It was at Wellesley that Annie learned spectroscopic measurements, including absorption and emission spectroscopy. Absorption spectroscopy is the process by which one measures the radiation produced from an object. Photons are absorbed, and then analyzed to determine the chemical makeup of that object. Absorption spectroscopy differs from emission spectroscopy, which is the measurement of the chemical makeup of an object by collecting the data from the photons that are emitted from an object. Emission spectroscopy looks at the wavelengths of atoms as they move from an excited state to a lower energy level. Absorption spectroscopy does the opposite. After Wellesley, Annie went back to Dover until the death of her mother in 1894. Annie was close with her mother and was willing to put off her scientific studies to care for her mother. She was itching to get back to astronomy, though. Annie then moved back to Wellesley to be an assistant physics professor. She also studied astronomy further at Radcliffe.

Pickering's Women []

**Professional Life**
In 1896 Annie was hired by the observatory director, Edward Pickering at Harvard College. She was hired along with a group of women and they were nick named ‘Pickering’s Women’. These women were in charge of gathering facts and keeping track of astronomical data. It was Annie and her colleagues’ jobs to classify and organize the stars by their various spectra. Pickering was able to actually record the spectra of the stars, but he was unable to come up with a clear and concise system of categorizing them. Annie came into this project ten years after it had begun because she took the place of women who had to drop out of the group. All the women were working on their own systems of classification, and Annie did the same.

Annie began to classifying the stars in the southern hemisphere into the spectral classes, O B A F G K M, that the previous women had developed. While organizing these stars into their classes, Annie created a mnemonic device to remember the classes. She came up with Oh Be A Fine Girl- Kiss Me to remember the letters and order of the classes. This device is still used frequently today. Pickering liked Annie’s system because it was memorable and pithy – it was not too vague or too confusing. What set this system apart from those of Annie’s peers was that although it was still very much theory based, it was simple.

Annie saw that the main difference in the stars that she was categorizing was their temperature. Previous classification systems did not group stars this way, so Annie took the previous systems and combined them into this simplified system. Instead of Hydrogen absorption-line strength, Annie ordered the stars by their temperature, and as a result, the redundancy of the previous spectral class types was eliminated. After Annie came up with her final order: OBAFGKM, she then broke them up into smaller sub-categories, e.g., A0, A1, A2… A9 for type A, and so on.

While working at Harvard, Annie made 25 cents a day. This was significantly less than the professors made, and even the secretaries made more. It is clear that although Annie’s work was later deemed significant and important, at the time it was not top priority. Pickering’s Women, the group of women that Annie was working with, were simply a mix of unskilled female workers that did clerical work. Little did Pickering know that this group of women that he put together would make such a significant contribution to the field of astronomy.

**Accomplishments**
Annie listed almost 230,000 stars on her own; more than any other person, male or female, in history. She also discovered 300 other stars. Because of her work, two years befor Annie retired, she became the William C. Bond Astronomer at Harvard, and she also received the Henry Draper Medal, which was a very big accomplishment, considering only one other female had received the honor who had to share it with a man. The Henry Draper Medal is an annual honor that is given to a successful astrophysicist by the United States National Academy of Sciences. Annie was the recipient of this medal in 1931.

Annie received many other awards including being named one of America’s 12 greatest living women in 1929 by the National League of Women Voters. She was also awarded the Ellen Richards Prize in 1932. Annie was voted the first women officer of the American Astronomical Society. She also has a crater called Cannon named after her on the moon. Annie also was the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Oxford University. At Harvard, she was named the curator of astronomical photographs. Today, there is an award presented by the American Association of University Women named the Annie J. Cannon award which is given to young, female astronomers just beginning their career in the difficult field of astronomy.

Annie working with a telescope as one of Pickering's Women []

"Starry in the USA" -- This video clip puts a modern, musical twist to Annie Jump Cannon’s life, while still present valuable information. []

References and Helpful Links:
All sources were used throughout the report, but none were quoted directly.

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