Annie Jump Cannon

Hello! My name is Annie Jump Cannon, and I love looking at the stars. I was born on a chilly day, December 11th, 1863, in a town called Dover, Delaware. When I was a little girl, my best friend was my mother, Mary. At night, we would climb up to our little attic, open a special door in the roof, and gaze at the sparkling night sky. She taught me all about the constellations, and right then, I knew I wanted to study the stars forever. When I was young, I got an illness called scarlet fever. It made it very hard for me to hear, but it never stopped me from looking up and dreaming big.

Not many women went to college back then, but I did! I went to Wellesley College and studied science. After I graduated in 1884, I knew I had to keep learning about the stars. In 1896, I got a very important job at the Harvard College Observatory. I joined a team of smart women who were nicknamed the 'Harvard Computers.' Our job was to look at photographs of thousands and thousands of stars. We were like star detectives, studying clues to figure out what each star was made of and how hot it was. It was the most exciting puzzle in the world, and I couldn't wait to get to work every day.

Imagine trying to sort a giant pile of colorful buttons! That's what sorting the stars felt like. At first, the system for sorting them was very confusing. So, I came up with my own idea. I created a simple system using just a few letters: O, B, A, F, G, K, and M. The hottest, bluest stars were 'O' stars, and the coolest, reddest stars were 'M' stars. I got very, very good at it. I could look at a star's picture and know its type in just a few seconds! My work helped create a giant book of stars called the Henry Draper Catalogue, which started being published in 1918. I sorted more stars than anyone else in history—hundreds of thousands of them!

I worked with the stars for almost my whole life and showed everyone that women could be amazing scientists. I even became the first woman to receive a special honor from a big university in England called Oxford in 1925. I lived to be 77 years old, and my star-sorting system is still used by astronomers today to understand our amazing universe. So next time you look up at the night sky, think of me, Annie, and the secret code of the stars that I helped to unlock for everyone.