Posted
on December 11, 2014
As
a young adult, Annie Jump Cannon (who was born on this date in 1863)
was stricken with scarlet fever. She recovered, but she had lost
almost all of her hearing.
Cannon
was almost entirely deaf!
Luckily
for Cannon, her mother had raised her with a love of learning and had
always encouraged her to follow her dreams. Cannon had taken math,
chemistry, and biology courses at Wellesley College but had ended up
pursuing her biggest love: astronomy. And she had graduated from
Wellesley with a degree in physics...
Before
her illness, Cannon had traveled from America (where she was born and
raised) to Europe to photograph a solar eclipse. After recovering
from her illness, Cannon asked one of her favorite professors, Sarah
Frances Whiting, for help getting a job in astronomy. Whiting was
able to arrange for Cannon to teach and take graduate-level courses
at the college – which is probably quite tough to do when
you're deaf!
At
the time, almost all colleges were separated into women's colleges
and all the other colleges (which enrolled only men). Cannon enrolled
at Radcliffe, a women's college founded near Harvard College (today
one of the best universities in the world), so she could gain access
to a better telescope. Soon Harvard professor Edward C. Pickering
hired Cannon as his assistant at the Harvard College Observatory. And
so she became a member of “Pickering's Women,” a group of women
working together with Pickering to complete a star catalog.
Actually,
several of the women working on the classification project disagreed
about how the stars should be classified. Cannon created a compromise
by coming up with system that was fairly simple but complex enough to
be useful, with stars divided up into spectral classes O, B, A, F, G,
K, and M. She also came up with the mnemonic “Oh, Be A Fine Girl,
Kiss Me!” as a way to remember the classes.
Cannon
published her first catalog of stellar spectra in 1901. By 1922, the
International Astronomical Union passed a resolution to adopt her
classification system.
And
Cannon is remembered today as having classified more stars in her
lifetime than any other person, male or female. She classified around
500,000 stars! (That's half a million!) Also, she discovered 300
variable stars, five novas, and one spectroscopic binary.
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