catskewl: Today in history May 9, we recognize astronomer, suffragette and scientist, Annie Jum
catskewl: Today in history May 9, we recognize astronomer, suffragette and scientist, Annie Jump Cannon. On May 9, 1922, the International Astronomical Union passed the resolution to formally adopt Cannon’s stellar classification system; with only minor changes, it is still being used for classification today. Cannon manually classified more stars in a lifetime than anyone else, with a total of around 350,000 stars. She discovered 300 variable stars, five novas, and one spectroscopic binary, creating a bibliography that included about 200,000 references. She discovered her first star in 1898, though she was not able to confirm it until 1905. When she first started cataloging the stars, she was able to classify 1,000 stars in three years, but by 1913, she was able to work on 200 stars an hour. Cannon could classify three stars a minute just by looking at their spectral patterns and, if using a magnifying glass, could classify stars down to the ninth magnitude, around 16 times fainter than the human eye can see. Her work was also highly accurate. -- source link