Annie Jump Cannon

She Filled the Sky: The Awesome Astronomy of Annie Jump Cannon

This week’s post you get an awesome cartoon  by the fab Dale DeBakcsy from the Illustrated Women in Science series at MadArtLab in addition to the usual written profile! Enjoy!

 

350,000 stars classified. It’s one of astronomy’s unbreakable and frankly not even approachable records, the scientific equivalent of the Ripken Streak. Seven hours a day, six days a week, for forty-four years, one woman bent herself to the task of creating an ultimate chart of the night sky, with each star classified not only by position, but by surface temperature and spectral signature. Hunched over a magnifying glass, she could categorize three stars a minute where others might take three minutes to categorize one star. She was astronomy’s Iron Woman – Annie Jump Cannon.