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An American astronomer who was deaf. She worked at Harvard University cataloging the stars and was instrumental in developing the current system of stellar classification.
Annie Jump Cannon was born in Dover, Delaware on December 11, 1863.[1] She was the daughter of Wilson Lee Cannon, a Delaware shipbuilder and state senator, and his second wife, Mary Elizabeth (Jump) Cannon). Her mother taught her to recognize constellations as a child. Her mother created a kind of observatory in the attic of their home for Annie and her sisters. She studied physics and astronomy at Radcliffe College. For ten years after she graduated in 1884, she pursued astronomy as a hobby while living at home with her parents. By that time, she had become deaf, and though she eventually had some hearing with a hearing aid, she was for much of her life totally deaf.
After her mother died in 1894, she continued her studies at Wellesley, with professor Sarah Frances Whiting, and became especially interested in stellar spectroscopy, which helps to identify the elements in a star. In 1895, she went to study astronomy at Radcliffe College.[2]
Her classification system categorizes stars by letters of the alphabet and is commonly referred to as Harvard Spectral Classification Scheme. Her methodology was adopted by the International Astronomical Union in 1922 as the official system for stellar spectra classification.
She discovered about 300 stars and classified the photographic spectra of about 325,000 more, for which Time Magazine profiled her as "Census-taker of the sky". She was the first woman officer of the American Astronomical Society. She received an official appointment by Harvard as an astronomer in 1938, the first woman so honored.
She also was an outspoken suffragette. She never married or had children. Annie died in 1941 at age 77 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was buried in Lakeside Cemetery, Dover, Delaware.[3]
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