Annie Jump Cannon
Sep. 4th, 2011 05:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
She is an astronomer, September:
On the calendar there's also an old portrait photograph and a modern painting of Annie with a diagram of the colours and sizes of stars.
More info from her Wikipedia entry: She originally graduated in physics. "Uninterested in the limited career opportunities available to women, she grew bored and restless. Her partial hearing loss made socializing difficult"... Her first astronomy-related job was as assistant to Sarah Frances Whiting, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Wellesley, and it was then that she took graduate courses, learned spectroscopy, and developed her photographic skills. Another woman important to her career was Anna Draper, who set up a fund to support the cataloguing work.
Wellesley College has several pages about her life and work.
Annie Jump Cannon
1863-1941
Cannon is the most wellknown of the "Pickering’s women", the group of women hired by Harvard Observatory director Edward Pickering to make the Draper Catalog, mapping and classifying all the stars in the sky. She invented the stellar classification scheme of spectral classes O, B, A, F, G, K, M, and she gave her system a mnemonic of "Oh Be a Fine Girl and Kiss Me." This system was adopted with very small changes by the International Astronomical Union. Her career lasted more than 40 years, during which time she classified more stars than any other person in history, male or female.
She was the first woman to be given an honoris causa doctorate degree by the University of Oxford (1925).
She determined and classified the spectra of more than 230,000 stars.
On the calendar there's also an old portrait photograph and a modern painting of Annie with a diagram of the colours and sizes of stars.
More info from her Wikipedia entry: She originally graduated in physics. "Uninterested in the limited career opportunities available to women, she grew bored and restless. Her partial hearing loss made socializing difficult"... Her first astronomy-related job was as assistant to Sarah Frances Whiting, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Wellesley, and it was then that she took graduate courses, learned spectroscopy, and developed her photographic skills. Another woman important to her career was Anna Draper, who set up a fund to support the cataloguing work.
Wellesley College has several pages about her life and work.