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Happy birthday to astronomer Annie Jump Cannon! Did you know she could classify about three stars a minute? Born in 1863, she attended Wellesley College in 1880, studying physics and astronomy, and later worked with Edward C. Pickering at the Harvard College Observatory as a “computer.” Cannon was known for her skills in star classification—in fact, her simplified system for classifying stars according to their temperature was adopted as the universal standard in the early 1900s and is still used today. She classified more than 225,000 stars over her lifetime! Cannon was also the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Oxford University, as well as the first women to be elected as an officer of the American Astronomical Society.
Image: Smithsonian Institution