Whenever I use the word stellar, I rarely think about the stars. I seem to plop the word in a sentence when I’m talking about something exceptionally good or outstanding.
Such is the case when I speak of Annie Jump Cannon, who, coincidentally, is the person that created our current methods of stellar classifications. I’ve said it before. I truly don’t know that much about the stars. But I do know that scientists like to classify things, and stars fall right in line with that. Annie Jump Cannon was the smart person who figured all of this out.
Her beginnings are sweet. She was born on December 11, 1863, in Dover, Delaware. Today is her birthday, hence my interest. She was the eldest of three girls in her family. Her father was Wilson Cannon, a Delaware shipbuilder, and state senator. I don’t know who his first wife was, but his second wife was Mary Jump. She is Annie Jump Cannon’s mother.
It Mary Jump who gets the Great Woman-Mother Award. She was the first person to teach Annie the constellations. She also encouraged her to follow her own interests, her own dreams, her own aspirations. Mother Jump Cannon suggested that Annie pursue studies in mathematics, chemistry, and biology at Wellesley College.
But those two would go up into their attic and use an old textbook to identify the stars. Her mother also taught her organizational skills around the household. Cannon would later use these same methods in organizing her research.
At some point during her childhood, Cannon lost her hearing. There are varying sources on the how and why of this. Which I think is a little odd. Anyway, it didn’t stop her. She was brilliant and went on to pursue her love of astronomy.
She followed her mother’s advice about school. In 1880, Cannon was accepted to Wellesley College in Massachusetts, one of the top academic schools for women back then. There she studied physics and astronomy and graduated with a degree in physics in 1884. But then, she returned home to Delaware for a decade.
For a while, she took a great interest in photography and did some work in that area. But, in 1894, Cannon’s mother died, and life at home grew more difficult. She wrote to her former instructor at Wellesley, a professor named Sarah Frances Whiting. Cannon asked if there might be a job opening, and sure enough, she was hired as a junior physics teacher at the college.
This job made way for Cannon to take some graduate courses there, specifically in physics and astronomy. It was her old teacher, Whiting, who inspired Cannon to learn about spectroscopy. She started looking toward the stars.
A series of educational circumstances gave Cannon access to the Harvard College Observatory. In 1896, Edward C. Pickering hired her as his assistant at the Harvard Observatory. In 1907, Cannon finished her studies and received her master’s from Wellesley College.
That same year, Cannon became a member of the “Harvard Computers.” They were a group of women hired by Harvard Observatory director Edward C. Pickering to complete the “Henry Draper Catalogue.” Their project, their goal, was to map and define every star in the sky to a photographic magnitude of about 9.
As it was, Cannon excelled at this. Pickering said that she was able to classify stars quickly, “Miss Cannon is the only person in the world—man or woman—who can do this work so quickly.”
However, they had a system that was terribly complex, and classification was not easy. Things were difficult and slow. But Cannon thought of a better way. She started by examining the bright southern hemisphere stars.
To these stars, she applied a system, a division of stars into the spectral classes O, B, A, F, G, K, M. Her schematic was based on the temperature of the stars. The classification is the one used today. Astronomy students are taught to use a mnemonic of “Oh Be a Fine Girl, Kiss Me” as a way to remember stellar classification.
There is a lot more about her life. Cannon manually classified more stars in a lifetime than anyone else, with a total of around 350,000 stars. She discovered 300 variable stars, five novas, and many other things.
She never married, and little details are written about her personal life. Cannon died on April 13, 1941, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 77. She had been ill for a month.
Like Annie Jump Cannon. May we all reach for our own stars, today and every day.
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“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
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“Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie
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“Do not complain beneath the stars about the lack of bright spots in your life.”
― Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
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The woman who was counter and keeper of the stars.
