🌅 The Woman Computer Who Catalogued the Stars

SOURCE

Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

WHAT TO KNOW

• Annie Jump Cannon was a deaf woman astronomer who worked as a human computer (i.e., a person who did calculations) at the Harvard Observatory beginning in 1896. Cannon and a group of other highly educated, yet still underpaid, women—later known as the Harvard Computers—were tasked with manually cataloging every known star using images captured by telescopes printed on glass plates. Each glass plate image contained thousands of stars the women counted aloud one by one as a coworker took notes recording the data.

WHY IT MATTERS

• Cannon developed a classification system for cataloguing stars based on their color and temperature that’s still used by astronomers today (her system was actually an update of two previous systems created by other Harvard Computers). Cannon catalogued more than 350,000 stars during her 40-year career, earning her nickname as the “census taker of the sky.” Despite the acclaim she earned, Cannon was denied a faculty position at Harvard until 1938, two years before her retirement. She died in 1941 at age 77.

CONNECT THE DOTS

• Cannon was a proud suffragette and member of the National Women’s Party, which was formed in 1916 to advocate for the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted women the right to vote. While the landmark classification system she developed was named after Harvard not herself, the asteroid Cannonia and the Cannon lunar crater are both named after her.