a biography of the day--annie jump cannon
Annie Jump Cannon
Born December 11, 1863
Dover, Delaware[1]
Died April 13, 1941 (aged 77)
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Nationality American
Known for Stellar Classification
Influences Sarah Frances Whiting, American Physicist and Astronomer
Notable awards Henry Draper Medal (1931)
Annie Jump Cannon (December 11, 1863 - April 13, 1941) was an American astronomer whose cataloging work was instrumental in the development of contemporary stellar classification. 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. She was nearly deaf throughout her career.
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Cannon studied under Sarah Frances Whiting, one of the few women physicists in the United States at the time, and went on to become the valedictorian at Wellesley College. She graduated with a degree in physics in 1884 and returned home to Delaware for a decade.[7] This was partly due to the fact that there were limited opportunities available to women in the careers that Cannon was interested in.[citation needed] Also during these years, Cannon developed her skills in the new art of photography. In 1892 she traveled through Europe taking photographs with her Blair box camera. After she returned home her prose and photos from Spain were published in pamphlet called "In the Footsteps of Columbus" by the Blair Company, and distributed as a souvenir at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.[8]
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In 1896, Cannon became a member of "Pickering’s Women",[12] the women hired by Harvard Observatory director Edward C. Pickering to complete the Henry Draper Catalogue, mapping and defining every star in the sky to photographic magnitude of about 9. Anna Draper, the widow of wealthy physician and amateur astronomer Henry Draper, set up a fund to support the work. Men at the laboratory did the labor of operating the telescopes and taking photographs while the women examined the data, carried out astronomical calculations, and cataloged those photographs during the day.[10] Pickering made the Catalogue a long-term project to obtain the optical spectra of as many stars as possible and to index and classify stars by spectra. If making measurements was hard, the development of a reasonable classification was at least as difficult.
Not long after work began on the Draper Catalogue, a disagreement developed as to how to classify the stars. The analysis was first started by Nettie Farrar, who left a few months later to be married. This left the problem to the ideas of Henry Draper's niece Antonia Maury (who insisted on a complex classification system) and Williamina Fleming (who was overseeing the project for Pickering,[12] and wanted a much more simple, straightforward approach).[7] Cannon negotiated a compromise: she started by examining the bright southern hemisphere stars. To these stars she applied a third system, a division of stars into the spectral classes O, B, A, F, G, K, M. Her scheme was based on the strength of the Balmer absorption lines. After absorption lines were understood in terms of stellar temperatures, her initial classification system was rearranged to avoid having to update star catalogues. Cannon came up with the mnemonic of "Oh Be a Fine Girl, Kiss Me" as a way to remember stellar classification.[7] Cannon published her first catalog of stellar spectra in 1901.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Jump_Cannon