Annie Jump Cannon (December 11, 1863 – April 13, 1941)
My topic in this essay is about an eminent and inspiring women astronomer. Born on December 11, 1863 in Dover, Delaware, she attended Wellesley College as an undergrad and graduate student, studying physics and astronomy. The cold winter climate in the area led to repeated infections, and in was stricken with scarlet fever. As a result, she became almost completely deaf.A trailblazer for women in science, she went on to discover hundreds of variable stars and at Harvard devised a unique system of classification for the Draper catalog, in which she listed hundreds of thousands of stars. Yes she is none other than Annie Jump Cannon. I choose her for the topic because of her passion and dedication even thou she was almost deaf, shows that she’s very inspiring person and passionate.
Annie Jump Cannon was a pioneering astronomer responsible for the classification of hundreds of thousands of stars.Annie 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. Uninterested in the limited career opportunities available to women, she grew bored and restless. Her partial hearing loss made socializing difficult, and she was generally older and better educated than most of the unmarried women in the area. She had made a trip to Europe in 1892 to photograph the solar eclipse, but returned with her situation little improved. She developed a stellar classification system that became the standard of the Harvard Observatory. Cannon's paramount contribution to astronomy was The Henry Draper Catalogue, named after the first man to photograph stellar spectra. In the Draper catalogue can be found spectral classifications of virtually all stars brighter than ninth or tenth...
