Annie Jump Cannon

Annie Jump Cannon ( born December 11, 1863 in Dover, Delaware, USA, † April 13, 1941 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States) was an American astronomer. She was known by the mnemonic Oh Be A Fine Girl - Kiss Me, which has generations of astronomers taught the order of the spectral classes.

Life

Cannon was the eldest of three daughters of Wilson Cannon, a shipbuilder and Senator from Delaware, and his wife Mary Jump.

At Wellesley College Annie studied physics and astronomy and began spectroscopic observations of stars.

After graduating, she returned for a decade to Delaware. After her mother's death in 1894 she began to work as a teacher in Wellesley and studied astronomy at Radcliffe. In 1896, she joined Edward Charles Pickering at the Harvard College Observatory with astronomical data reduction.

By assisted by Nettie Farrar, Williamina Fleming, Antonia Maury and patience they came to the classification of the spectral lines of stars in the spectral classes O, B, A, F, G, K and M. Thus, they revised the previous system of the spectral sequence of stars by new findings could remove some of the original classes from the sequence. Cannon also led numbers for further subdivision of the spectral type of a star. For this purpose, they used numbers from 0 to 9, where a higher number greater coolness of the star corresponds. The sun, for example, a star of spectral type G2, and thus cooler than a star with the classification G1, but warmer than a star with the spectral type G3.

Cannon classified over 400,000 stars. In addition, it published a catalog of variable stars.

Her career came at a time of increasing recognition of the power of women in science. She was the first woman honorary doctorate at Oxford and was admitted to the AAS. 1929 called the League of Women Voters them as one of the twelve greatest living American women. The Annie Jump Cannon Prize for Astronomy of the AAS and a moon crater named in her honor.