Google celebrates Annie Jump Cannon

December 11, 2014 • 6:53 am

No, I hadn’t heard of her either, and probably only astronomy buffs know much about her. But I became aware of Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941) when I saw this doodle on Google this morning (click on the screenshot to go to her Wikipedia biography). You can read yourself about how instrumental Cannon was in classifying stars (she herself classified more than half a million!) while working at the Harvard Observatory. Her work was pivotal in leading to the modern classification of stars based on their light spectra, which in turn tells us about their surface temperature and something about their age.  In fact, some of classes she devised are still used today: see here for a list.

The Doodle celebrates Cannon’s 151st birthday:

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Two notes from Wikipedia; the first on her proficiency:

She classified more stars in a lifetime than anyone else, with a total of around 500,000 stars. She also discovered 300 variable stars, five novas, and one spectroscopic binary, creating a bibliography that included about 200,000 references.Cannon could classify three stars a minute just by looking at their spectral patterns and, if using a magnifying glass, could classify stars down to the ninth magnitude, around 16 times fainter than the human eye can see.

And the second reflecting the position of women in science at that time:

Cannon and the other women at the Observatory were criticized at first for being “out of their place” and not being housewives. In fact, women could only get as high as assistants in this line of work and were only paid 25 cents an hour for seven hours a day, six days a week. Cannon dominated this field because of her “tidiness” and patience for the tedious work, and even helped the men in the observatory gain popularity. . . Annie Jump Cannon’s career in astronomy lasted for more than 40 years, until her retirement in 1940. During this time, Cannon helped women gain acceptance and respect within the scientific community. Her calm, hardworking attitude and demeanor helped her gain respect throughout her lifetime and paved the path for future women astronomers.

No comment is needed.  Finally, here’s a photo of Cannon at her desk at the Harvard Observatory:

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33 thoughts on “Google celebrates Annie Jump Cannon”

  5. The recent Tyson ‘Cosmos’ series devoted most of an episode to her (which was the first time I’d seen reference to her..)

      1. Yes, that was the first time I was introduced to her as well. It’s nice to see her being celebrated by the mighty Google.

  6. She was featured in animated segments in Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey (the 2014 version), voiced by Marlee Matlin no less. The eighth episode illuminated very well the development of astrophysics, and the role of women at the time.

    There’s a nice discussion (The Wire).

    1. I was quite pleased that they got a deaf actress to do the voice work in those segments.

      Annie Jump Cannon and most of the other women working on the project had some degree of deafness.

      1. Interesting correlation, that. Makes me wonder whether the deafness ruled out other more preferable work options, or whether it provided an advantage by eliminating distractions.

  7. Well known in astronomy circles, including amateurs.
    A number of other under-appreciated women in the history of astronomy come to mind. In no particular order : Herschel’s sister (whose name is slipping off the tip of my hung-over tongue. Anne? Sorry, Caroline.) ;Jocelyn Bell – who should have got a Nobel for her discovery of pulsarsAs Diana says, the whole crew of “Harvard Computers”

    1. Great book to check out for those interested in William and Caroline Herschel:

      The Georgian Star: How William and Caroline Herschel Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Cosmos

      1. Astronomy doesn’t have the worst of reputations for misogyny, I guess. But it’s hardly a stellar record either.
        It’s not a particularly physical subject. There’s not a lot of “the best stars are found three dunes after the death of the last camel” (standing geologist joke) ; you don’t get to wrestle too many great white sharks ; there’s a lot of maths, and there’s no inconvenient knowledge of organism’s wobbly bits (I was recently referred to one of the first palynologists – people who study microscopic bits of plant debris in rocks – you may know her name, if not her original profession : Marie Stopes. What was the context – oh yes : Scott of the Antarctic was carrying fossils specifically collected for her when his team died.)

  9. There were several major components to the work she did : the colour of the peak of the continuum spectrum reflected the temperature of the star through the black body relation (this was one of the annoying mis-fitting bits of science that started the cracking of “classical physics and the establishment of the reality of quantum physics – a revolution which we’re still going through today (wot? No quantum theory of gravity? Back to work, theoretical physicists!). The next component of the spectrum was non-continuum emission lines which gives some indication of the chemistry of the star, but also often indicates the strangenesses of the stellar atmosphere, because thes materials can be at drastically different temperatures to the stellar body (the Sun’s surface is around 6000 K, but the atmosphere over a million). The final major component is the absorption lines, which generally indicates the chemical composition of the cooler components of the surface of the star. With practice, you can do a lot of this interpretation by eye – though with digital data acquisition these days, that’s becoming a lost skill.
    (I did an Open University field course in astronomy a few years ago which included these techniques as a night’s work. Great fun.)

    1. And just after Annie Jump Cannon, enter Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. The 1st woman to earn a PhD in Astronomy from Harvard. Who’s thesis related the spectral class of stars, AJC’s (& the other Harvard’s Computers woman) work, to their temperatures. And thereby discovered that stars were mostly hydrogen instead of having a composition similar to the earths. Which conclusion Henry Norris Russell, one of her thesis reviewers, disparaged and convinced her to remove. Only to verify by other methods and publish on himself several years later. He did acknowledge her previous findings, but HNR is still typically credited with the discovery.

        1. I didn’t see the particular episode, but doing some googling it looks like both Woman were featured in that episode. Makes sense. Both were trailblazers for woman in science and academics in general, both were at Harvard very close in time, and the work of AJC was key to CPG’s thesis.

  10. Not on Google UK… in fact I now avoid Google & wherever possible use an ‘ethical’ websearch Ecosia, who plant trees…

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