“Skies-organizingly,
Annie Jump Cannon,
With skills astronomical,
Science uplifts.
Data-insighting;
Intensities, citing;
Observing and writing;
Most stellar, her gifts.”
The next science-themed poem from the April 2024 collection was a rare “Twitter bio” from that month. The 19 April 2024 poem focused on the career of Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941), an astronomer at Harvard College Observatory who developed a system for classifying the stars.
(Cannon was one of many gifted women scientists who worked as “Harvard computers” at the Observatory around the turn of the 20th century. Dava Sobel’s superb book, The Glass Universe, is one of many that tells these astronomers’ stories in far greater detail than these brief posts can allow, and the following is only a summary.)
“Skies-organizingly, /
Annie Jump Cannon, /
With skills astronomical, /
Science uplifts…”
Annie Jump Cannon graduated in 1884 from Wellesley College, having studied astronomy and physics there. In 1896, she was hired as a “computer” at the Harvard College Observatory, by the then-director Edward Pickering. The observatory collected an immense amount of data, and help was needed to compile it. The expectation was that Cannon’s primary role would involve processing the existing data already collected by male astronomers (computing the answers to calculations suggested by their findings).
However, Cannon soon made several advances as an independent scientist. Building on her spectroscopic training, she devised an approach to classify stars in a more systematic way than in previous years, via their line spectra. [Line spectra are investigated across a range of scientific disciplines, including chemistry. They are patterns of lines that reflect the quantized behavior of atoms: only certain energetic changes are allowed for electrons within atoms (this is a major idea discussed with quantum mechanics). Since only certain energies are allowed, only certain wavelengths of light are correspondingly seen, causing these characteristic line patterns for each element.]
Cannon’s skills were “astronomical” both in terms of disciplinary alignment and in the advances they allowed, as she advanced a new approach for organizing the stars in the sky.
“Data-insighting;
Intensities, citing;
Observing and writing;
Most stellar, her gifts.”
The classification scheme that Cannon devised has been refined slightly but is still used today, linking the brightness of stars to their temperatures. To repeat the poetic license of “astronomical” from above, her gifts were “stellar” twice over, with respect to both her subject matter and the acumen with which she completed her investigations.
Chemphasis 