As a child living on State Street in Dover, Annie Jump Cannon loved to stargaze
from her roof, and was fascinated by sunlight as it passed through the prisms of her mother's
candelabras. Fortunately, her father, unlike many men of his generation, felt it
was important for his daughter to have an education. Annie Cannon took courses at the Dover
Academy and then entered Wellesley College, becoming one of Delaware's first
young women to
attend college.
Several years after graduating,
Miss Cannon returned to Wellesley for graduate study, assisting Professor Sarah F. Whitney.
She transferred
to Radcliffe College and the Harvard Observatory to study the
Observatory's photographs of the spectra of stars under Professor
Edward C. Pickering. At Harvard she developed a system for classifying the spectra of
stars known as the Harvard Classification. Her system is still used today.
From 1911 until 1914 Annie
Cannon studied 15,000 photographic plates and put together an
amazing publication, the Henry Draper Catalog, published in nine volumes. (Draper,
a professor at the College of the City of New York, made the first photo of the spectrum
of a star. When he died in 1882 his widow donated his equipment to
Harvard.) The catalogue
listed 250,000 stars in the sky down to the ninth magnitude of brightness. Each was
identified by catalogue number, position, visual and photographic magnitudes, and spectral
type. After her work on the Draper Catalog was completed, she
catalogued an additional 50,000 stars.
In 1918 the University of Delaware conferred upon Miss Cannon the Doctor of Science
degree. She received honorary degrees from the University of Groningen
in Holland,
Wellesley, Oxford University (where she was the first woman to be honored with a doctorate
of science), Oglethorpe University, and Holyoke College.
Professor W.W. Campbell from Lick Observatory described
Annie Cannon's work:
It is impossible to overestimate the value of this catalogue to all students of the
stars. It should be said
that we are indebted to Miss Annie Jump Cannon of the Harvard Observatory, for the
faithful, able, and extensive work of examining the photographs upon which this catalogue
is based, and for the resulting description of the individual spectra.
Annie Jump Cannon's awards and honors are too numerous to list here.
She was the first
woman, and only the second person, to be named an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical
Society in London in 1914. She was the first woman officer of the American Astronomical
Society. In 1923 the League of Women Voters elected her one of the twelve
greatest living women.
Preferring starlight to the limelight,
Miss Cannon spoke little of herself during infrequent
interviews. She put the emphasis on the role of women in the science of
astronomy, which she termed an "international diplomacy of the skies." "When
one sees the crowds of careless and free college girls of today, it is hard to conceive of
the time when mathematical or other scientific study by girls was so shocking... that she
must needs do all her study secretly at night with a candle by her bedside."
Much of the prize money she collected was turned over to
universities to provide for scholarships for young women astronomers.
Described as a delightfully modest and unassuming woman, when asked about her
success, Annie Cannon replied: "My success, if you would call it that, lies in the fact that I
have kept at my work all these years. It is not genius or anything, like that, it is
merely patience."
Great Women Hall of Fame
Annie Jump Cannon