Cannon, Annie Jump

Cannon, Annie Jump

(1863–1941) astronomer; born in Dover, Del. Although deaf, she was a gifted pianist and amateur photographer, and after graduating from Wellesley she studied astronomy at Radcliffe College. In 1896 she was hired at the Harvard College Observatory, remaining there for her entire career. Devising a system for classifying stellar spectra, she reorganized the classification of stars in terms of surface temperature and catalogued over 225,000 stars. She was the first woman honored with a doctorate at Oxford and the only woman member of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Cannon, Annie Jump

 

Born Dec. 11, 1863, in Dover, Del.; died Apr. 13, 1941, in Cambridge, Mass. American astronomer.

Cannon graduated from Wellesley College in 1884. From 1897 to 1941 she was on the staff of the Harvard Observatory. Cannon, together with E. Pickering, published (1918–24) a voluminous work that contained a classification of the spectra of 225,330 stars.

REFERENCE

Pannekoek, A. Istoriia astronomii. (Translated from English.) Moscow, 1966.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.