Annie Jump Cannon was born on December 11, 1863 in Dover, Delaware. Her mother, Mary Jump, taught Annie about the constellations at a young age and later sparked her interest in the stars. She was the eldest daughter of Wilson Cannon, a Delaware state senator, and Mary Jump. He studied physics and astronomy at Wellesley College, graduating in 1884. For several years he traveled and devoted himself to photography and music. In 1894 he returned to Wellesley for a year of advanced study in astronomy, and in 1895 he enrolled at Radcliffe to continue his studies with Edward C Pickering, who was the director of the Harvard College Observatory. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay In 1896 Cannon was appointed assistant at the Harvard Observatory, becoming part of a group known as the "Pickering's Women." There, joining Williamina PS Pleming and Antonia Maury, he devoted his energies to Pickering's ambitious project begun in 1885, to record, classify and catalog the spectra of all stars down to those of the ninth magnitude. Fleming had initially classified stellar spectra with all the letters of the alphabet from A to Q, mainly based on the intensity of the hydrogen spectral lines. Maury created a new scheme with twenty-two groups I to XXIl and added three more subdivisions based on the sharpness of the spectral lines. She also placed Fleming's B stars before the A stars. In a catalog of 1,122 stars published in 1901, Annie dramatically simplified Fleming's scheme into the classes O, B, A, F, G, K, and M and retained P for the planetary nebula and Q for muscle stars. He also added numerical divisions, further dividing each class into ten10 steps from to nine9. It was soon realized that Annie's scheme actually classified stars according to their temperateness, and her spectral classification was adopted universally. He eventually obtained and classified the spectra of more than 225,000 stars. In 1911, Annie became the curator of astronomical photographs at the Harvard Observatory. She worked with surprising efficiency and was able to classify up to three stars per minute. In the 1920s Annie cataloged several hundred thousand stars down to magnitude 11. She discovered 300 variable stars, as well as five novae, a class of explosive stars. Annie has received honorary degrees from the University of Delaware, Oglethorpe University, and Mount Holyoke College. She was the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 1925. She was awarded the Henry Draper Gold Medal of the National Academy of Sciences. Annie was also the first woman to hold an official position in the American Astronomical Society. The organization still awards the honor for its established, the Annie Jump Cannon Award. The award is given to a distinguished astronomer early in her career. He dedicated his life to research and unintentionally broke down many barriers, which is why it must be said that he left a rich legacy that is still celebrated in scientific circles today. Having suffered from scarlet fever in her youth, Annie had become almost deaf and this was the reason she never married (more on this later though). She had established the Annie Jump Cannon Award for outstanding female astronomers in North America, eight years before her death, and the award is still given today. Part of the reason for her astronomical prowess was the fact that she was almost completely deaf. Although a bad attack of scarlet fever permanently damaged her hearing in college, she used it to her advantage. The relative silence, she would later say, allowed her to concentrate more on her work. Although some biographers claim that his.