Life And Legacy Of Annie Jump Cannon

Did you know that Annie Cannon was able to classify around a thousand stars a day during the peak of her career? This paper will be focusing on the life, career, and legacy of Annie Jump Cannon. Annie Jump Cannon was hired by Edward Pickering, and she worked as “Pickering’s assistant at the Harvard College Observatory” (1). After that, she was credited with coming up with an easy system that divided the stars into seven spectral classes. The spectral classes were as follows: O, B, A, F, G, K, M. Annie Jump Cannon’s career ended after forty years, but her work paved the way for women in the scientific community and continues to inspire fellow female scientists. Cannon was able to work hard enough that people in the scientific community looked past the fact that she was partially deaf and a woman. Annie Cannon is an important woman in the history of science because she was able to overcome sexism and a disability while developing her own revolutionary and important version of stellar classification. Obviously, Annie Cannon’s backstory is important because it can reveal

The way she handled herself brought acceptance and respect to all women in the scientific community. Annie’s scientific career lasted around four decades. Wikipedia holds, “Despite her retirement, she continued to actively work on astronomy in the observatory up until a few weeks before she died” (1). Cannon passed away on April 13, 1941. Astronomy had always been Annie Cannon’s true love. Her love for astronomy started when her mother showed her the constellations and it only ended when Annie passes away at the age of seventy-seven. Her legacy lives on because every year the Annie Jump Cannon Award is given to a female astronomer that has distinguished herself through work in astronomy. Cannon’s legacy also continues because her spectral classification is still taught to students