Annie Jump Cannon was an American astronomer, who coined the mnemonic "Oh Be a Fine Girl and Kiss Me" for the division of stars into the spectral classes O, B, F, G, K, M. Her cataloging work was instrumental in the development of contemporary stellar classification. She was nicknamed "Census Taker of the Sky" for classifying 230,000 stellar bodies, more than any other person, male or female.
Annie Jump Cannon was the eldest of three daughters of Wilson Cannon, a Delaware shipbuilder and state senator, and Mary Jump. Annie's mother taught her the constellations and stimulated her interest in astronomy at an early age. She attended college at Wellesley University where she studied physics and astronomy, and learned to make spectroscopic measurements. In 1894, Cannon returned to Wellesley for graduate study in physics and astronomy. In order to gain access to a better telescope, she decided to enroll at Radcliffe Women's College at Harvard.
In 1896, she was hired by Harvard College Observatory director Edward Pickering as a member of the Henry Draper Catalog project. Her job was to reduce data and carry out astronomical calculations, obtain optical spectra of as many stars as possible, and to index and classify stars by their spectra. While the measurements were difficult enough, the development of a reasonable classification scheme proved even more difficult.
The analysis was begun in 1886, where more than 10,000 stars spectra were analyzed and multiple classification schemes were developed. Annie Jump Cannon took over in 1897 and started by examining the bright southern hemisphere stars. To these stars she applied a division of stars into the spectral classes O, B, F, G, K, M, and she gave her system, the now famous mnemonic of Oh Be a Fine Girl and Kiss Me. Her "eye" for stellar spectra was phenomenal, and her Draper catalogs (which ultimately listed nearly 400,000 stars) were valued as the work of a single observer. Annie also published many other catalogues of variable stars including 300 that she discovered.
Annie Jump Cannon received many "firsts"; first recipient of an honorary doctorate from Oxford, first woman elected an officer of the American Astronomical Society, etc. At Harvard, she was named Curator of Astronomical Photographs and in 1938, and two years before her retirement she obtained a regular Harvard appointment as William C. Bond Astronomer. She also received the Henry Draper Medal, a distinction which only one other female has won. Annie Jump Cannon died April 13, 1941 and each year the American Association of University Women presents the Annie J. Cannon Award for distinguished contributions to astronomy.
http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/cannon.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Jump_Cannon
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